What? The easy to get student loans have driven up the prices? No, say it isn't so. Wait, say it is so, since I've been saying that it for years. Simple fact, colleges can't price themselves out of business or well, they'd be out of business. Back about 1980 or so, the college pricing system changed from "So you want to come to our college, great! How much money have you got?...and by the way, you better have at least this much, which is a sacrifice, but not impossible." to "How much money can you get...oh and don't forget all those easy to get loans that are out there, just waiting to be applied for!" Of course you're on your own when it's time to pay them back.....and now days they aren't discharged in bankruptcy either.
Kind of like easy mortgages inflated the price of residential real estate recently. Anybody remember that? Want to go back further? Take health insurance. Most doctors aren't calloused enough to let people die on their office doorstep (and even if they were, it looks bad to other potential customers, er, ah, patients). So they would just treat the ill and injured and if $10.00 was all the patient had, then I guess $10.00 was how much the doctor got....until a group of doctors had the brilliant idea of starting health insurance syndicates (Blue Cross was one of, if not the first) to trick people into saving so that now when they eventually got sick there was $30.00 in the insurance pot waiting for the doctors and hospital to take. Of course $30.00 looked like a lot of money in those days....so much so that people without insurance were afraid they could not pay that much and now they wanted insurance too....so employers started offering it.....now there were enough players to have $100.00 in the pot every time somebody got sick....and to the uninsured, well, if $10.00 was a hardship, $100.00 was simply an impossibility, so they better get insurance too. At least when the insurance was run by and for the benefit of doctors, the doctors didn't care if they got the $100.00 in fees or profits from the insurance, because they got the money either way. But over time, the insurance companies became more and more about making money on their own and suddenly they were in charge, taking in all those nice premiums, but now getting really cheap about paying claims to doctors and hospitals, having bookkeepers deny certain services because they costs too much, even when medical professionals said they were necessary (of course, the guy getting paid to perform the services has a vested interest in saying they are necessary......)
So anyway, what does any of this have to do with courting, marrying, immigration of or maintaining a relationship with a foreign spouse?
