<p>As a follow up to the Suze Orman thread: follow the link below to read about some real students and their feelings about their debt. </p>
<p>UPDATED:</a> Share Your Story -- Majoring In Debt</p>
<p>When you click on the first student, you get asked to sign into facebook. I was able to look at the other stories without signing into facebook, so you can skip the first one.</p>
<p>Wow, scary. Please repost when my S is getting ready to make a decision next April to remind me!</p>
<p>This is a great way of communicating to kids. All of the students look depressed, and who wouldn’t be with those numbers staring at them. The ones asking, “where’s my bailout?” don’t seem to understand the lambs-to-slaughter system. Kudos to the army veteran who is a lot smarter than his fellow students.</p>
<p>Another eye-opener is this week’s “Frontline” on PBS, which deals with for-profit universities and the disproportionate burden of debt carried by their graduates.</p>
<p>A lot of art students in that bunch.</p>
<p>That army veteran was smart getting his education without debt but he certainly earned it. I’m sure that it was no picnic for him and it cost him four years.</p>
<p>I really wish that some of the med school aspirants we see here as high school seniors trying to explain why it is so very important to run up $80K in undergraduate debt would see a slide show like this one just featuring doctors getting out of medical school.</p>
<p>I see it all of the time. What I have often seen that really concerns me is that kids who get tuition free or paid for by a relative take out the max Stafford loans any ways and any other loans that they can for living expenses. In some cases, it is a necessity, for kids with truly dysfunctional or poverty stricken home lives. But for some it is a luxury for which they become terribly in debt.</p>
<p>I think a school loan melt down is in the future.</p>
<p>I’m wondering how Kamala ended up with 90k in loans for an associates degree?!</p>
<p>[For-profit</a> colleges leave many students in debt | Philadelphia Inquirer | 05/06/2010](<a href=“http://www.philly.com/philly/education/92942669.html?cmpid=15585797]For-profit”>http://www.philly.com/philly/education/92942669.html?cmpid=15585797)</p>
<p>This article ran in the Phila Inquirer on student loans and defaults. Has some interesting numbers in it.</p>
<p>There are plenty of dumb-****s in that pile of crap.</p>
<p>Who gets in debt for a degree in art or anything from ITT Tech???</p>
<p>She was offered loans. She accepted them. Spent the money. My friend’s kids have cars, had their own apt, had trips abroad, etc financed by loans they were offered. They also owe $60-80 k. I don’t know what fool lending institution gave these kids those loans, under what terms, but they did. Just like the mortgage folks gave out all of those mortgage loans to people who had no hope of repaying them.</p>
<p>Giving out educational loans is very attractive business for folks. These loans (to my understanding) can’t be discharged by bankruptcy, so they will get their payout for many, many years at good interest rates, regardless of whether the student graduates, gets a job or needs help from others to make payments. Lenders don’t really care or think about what it will mean to the borrowers–the loans are good for the lenders & their clients.</p>
<p>I’m confused by a few…</p>
<p>[UPDATED:</a> Share Your Story – Majoring In Debt](<a href=“UPDATED: Share Your Story -- Majoring In Debt | HuffPost College”>UPDATED: Share Your Story -- Majoring In Debt | HuffPost College)</p>
<p>How has she gotten 26K in debt from a community college?</p>
<p>[UPDATED:</a> Share Your Story – Majoring In Debt](<a href=“UPDATED: Share Your Story -- Majoring In Debt | HuffPost College”>UPDATED: Share Your Story -- Majoring In Debt | HuffPost College)</p>
<p>What’s with the little kid’s debt? </p>
<p>I saw a couple of people in there with massive debt from ITT-Tech. Isn’t that like a trade school?</p>
<p>As I said, kids get loans based on total COA. They get the tuition payed and then used the money for other things.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that people with decent grades go to college and start right in to their credit classes. With a community college with open admissions, students might have to take reading, writing, math, and science classes where the credits are not applied to the degree (remedial classes). Some students have to take three math classes to get to a credit level math class, and sometimes they don’t pass the classes the first time, so they take it twice–or three times. It adds up even at about $100 a credit.</p>
<p>That series of articles is a testament to the consequences of bad decisions: pricey private college tuition for art degrees; borrowing thousands to study journalism when it essentially no longer exists as an employable field; having babies with little means of support, crushing debt, and a serious illness. The most stunning aspect of the articles for me was the near-majority opinion among the debtors that someone else – “the government,” it seems – has a responsibility to come along and unburden them of their debt, that they were somehow hoodwinked into borrowing all that money. Sadly, such attitudes suggest their employment futures will be fairly bleak; who would hire/continue to employ people who can’t take responsibility for their own actions? Community college followed by a third or fourth tier state university does not lead to the kind of debt these people have accrued; hubris and a sense of entitlement does.</p>
<p>^^At $100 a credit, 26K is 260 credits, and then presumably she also paid for some of it. Even if she didn’t, how does 260 credits happen? If she took 10 remedial classes, that’s probably ~35 credits. If she failed 10 classes that’s ~35 more. Now there’s still 190 credits. She’d had to have failed in the range of 165 credits in addition to the remedial to end up with 60 counted credits…</p>
<p>On community college - there must be living expenses or something else rolled into that. There’s the $2,500 tax credit for going to community college full-time.</p>
<p>This is why I’m glad that I’m only going to rack up about 3500 in loans a year. I will be paying off those loans as I go (They’re subsidized).</p>
<p>By the end of my four years I’m not looking at too much, and as I’ll hopefully be working by then they’ll be paid off within a year or two.</p>
<p>The for-profit colleges are huge in this.
One solution - limit subsidised loans to the mid-line tuition and fees at the state college.</p>
<p>Students who default are doing so on our tax dollar, but have been hood-winked into signing up for huge debts when the statistics from their graduates don’t support even a fraction of those loans.</p>
<p>And just tonight, there was an ad showing a 30 something lady unfurling her future with a one degree after another from one of these institutions. She’s flying through the air with banners unfurling, but no mention of “and if you don’t have lots and lots of money , no problem, we will get you lots and lots of loans that you can never discharge in bankruptcy and you will graduate with huge, huge debts and, while we can show you what our best students did, no promise of any job after graduation.”</p>