<p>If you go to the web site of the University and College Accountability Network, you can easily search for colleges and usually get information about the percentage of students receiving aid of various types and discover the average indebtedness at graduation. </p>
<p>It perhaps not surprising that NYU chooses not to provide this information, given its notoriously poor FA. To pick a few other NY schools, Vassar states that the average indebtedness is about $15K, with a 4-yr grad rate of 90%, while St John’s U, 4-yr grad rate 36%, cites $33.5K. Fordham, $38.6K! Hobart and William Smith $28.8K, Colgate $18.7K. The same pattern repeats itself in other states.</p>
<p>It’s all in the endowment, I would venture to guess. Which is why Brown’s FA isn’t as good as many other Ivies. Wellesley, historically, has had the highest endowment of any women’s college, and it has also charged less.</p>
<p>What disturbs me is not the amount charged by elite schools with generous FA, but the countless vastly inferior places that charge a similar amount and load students with debt, often coupling this with low graduation rates. I think there are a lot of marginal places that ought to close, and as a society we should put resources into state schools instead. Everyone is free to make their own choices, but if such schools had been my S’s only alternatives, he’d have graduated from U Maine Orono.</p>
<p>I would be more than happy to send my youngest to a state school but my state cut funding to our state schools and the schools cut their enrollment numbers in a time when the population of college aged kids was high. Now I believe many of them have a backlog of kids trying to get the classes they need to graduate. The freshman admission rates of many of the schools that were everyone’s backup to less than 20%. The state’s solution is telling everyone to go to junior college for 2 years but they are also short on classes. After paying taxes in this state for 30 years, I feel my state has failed me.</p>
<p>You can certainly tell creditors to leave you alone, but they don’t have to, and if they want their money, they probably won’t. As long as they abide by the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and any applicable state laws, any creditor can continue to take any lawful means to recoup the money that they are owed. And they can ruin your credit WHILE they do this.</p>
<p>And, depending on the legal procedures of the state and type of debt, a creditor may very well be able to “force” a debtor to pay through a judgment and court order to pay (if the debtor has the available funds, even if it means paying over time with a payment plan). If the judgment debtor violates the court order, there may be remedies for the judgment creditor:
-Wage garnishment
-Bank account levy
-Garnishment of tax refund
-A finding of contempt of court</p>
<p>So, as you can see, it can and often does get much worse that a “credit hit.”</p>
<p>@Erin’s Dad-I am in California and I’m not just referring to the UC System but the Cal State system also. I saw some figures showing less than 20% for some schools like Cal State Long Beach. I may have seen them on Wikipedia and had trouble finding the official info from the most recent admission year (this fall) or even Fall of 2013. The school system wants to group all the schools together often and some of the schools are in the middle of nowhere and not necessarily for everyone. The Cal state system was designed to accommodate most people who would like to live at home and commute to the local system.</p>
<p>@MiddKid86-Creditors can get judgements and garnish wages but the debtor often can reduce the monthly payment to something affordable and not the high payment of $2000 a month. Creditors can hold these judgements for a long time and try to collect many years later. So if the debtor wins the lottery, the creditor can still collect. I doubt a court would force this grandfather who is raising 3 grandkids in California on $70K will be forced to pay a large monthly sum and could be reduced to a very small amount that is not very significant for him.</p>
<p>Don’t forget that the elite schools can and do saddle parents with debt. Particularly those parents in the FA doughnut hole. Last year, while Harvard kids took out 5.7 million in loans, H parents took out 7.87 million in loans. In 2009, H parents took out about half of that amount. In 2008, they took out less than a million (can that be right?) And these amounts don’t count home equity loans, loans against retirement, etc. </p>
<p>I do see doughnut hole families beginning to choose options that are more affordable to them. I know students accepted to Ivies who are or will be going to Northeastern, Fordham, and Penn State, among others. For sure, lots of families are still willing to take on enormous debt to make the elite education happen, but I don’t know if that line of full pay families willing to take on the debt is as endless as I’m always hearing it is. On the one hand the common data sets indicate that parents at elite schools are increasing their debt loads each year, but on the other hand, I see with my own eyes more and more doughnut hole families with very high stats kids who are refusing to take on any debt. And that is something you never would have seen five to seven years ago. </p>
<p>Believe me, I know all about getting and enforcing judgments against debtors. Generally (and it varies by state according to state law), a court will not order payments that exceed a debtor’s basic living expenses. Payment of a judgment will not come before putting food on the table, but it WILL come before taking a vacation or buying a boat. If a debtor has no income or assets, there probably will not be any kind of payment order. As the saying goes, you can’t get blood from a stone. But - the judgment will stay on the books for possible future collection, in case things change.</p>
<p>My previous post was responding to your seemingly naive in the extreme statement that a debtor could simply tell a creditor to “leave them alone” and just take a credit hit, and that a debtor can’t be forced to pay.</p>
<p>“Last year, while Harvard kids took out 5.7 million in loans, H parents took out 7.87 million in loans.”</p>
<p>Do you have a link for these numbers? I haven’t seen them before. Assuming that they apply only to undergrads and their parents, there are 6500 Harvard undergrads. If half of them are taking loans, that’s about 2 grand each per year. If a quarter of them are taking loans (more likely), that’s 4 grand each per year. Multiplied by four years, that’s debt I’m comfortable with even for an undergrad, and more than comfortable with for a family making $100k+ (donut hole families will be making at least that much). Needless to say, I don’t want to see these numbers go up a lot, but I don’t find them troubling right now.</p>
<p>^^And taken out of context, the parent loan amount is almost meaningless. Perhaps some parents took out Parent Plus loans instead of tapping their home equity or selling some of their stock portfolio or cashing in grand-daddy’s trust fund.</p>
<p>In my case I took out several Plus loans just as part of cash management and financial planning. Paid them all off within 18 months of the last kid to graduate.</p>
<p>I don’t know how they were able to tell how many families were taking the PLUS loans. But PLUS loans are a line item in the CDS so we know each year’s total.</p>
<p>Interesting. If the average amount is $20,000 and the total, then that comes out to about 390 families taking loans out of 6000ish families (I’m assuming some families have two undergrads). Anyone whose Harvard EFC is $20k per year or higher is either earning $150k+ or has substantial liquid assets. I would have expected smaller loan amounts spread over more families.</p>
<p>^^That figure in the Chronicle is for loans taken 2010-2011 and it is for 270 families. The total PLUS number has risen significantly since then. Whether the number of families has stayed approximately the same and the average loan amount has risen significantly or the average amount has stayed the same and the number of families taking loans has increased, I can’t say. </p>
<p>@MiddKid86
I don’t think I’m naïve about creditors. I have had friends who went through divorces and creditors of their ex-spouses were pursuing them for payments that were assumed in the divorce by the ex-spouse. These friends took the credit hit for 7 years and did not pay their ex-spouses bills. There is a fair credit act where creditors can’t keep calling you for payment if you tell them to stop calling. I know even in this country, debtors do have some rights granted by the federal government.</p>
<p>So tell me what I’m missing here. Does the student loan debt fall under a different category here as far as the fair credit act and you can’t tell them to stop calling? I know you can’t discharge student loans in bankruptcy.</p>
<p>I doubt the dad in this story has a lot of assets. Yes, he may have to give up his vacations-we agree on that. But instead of calling me naïve, please tell me what I’m missing and what you know differently than me. I mean that sincerely. Fortunately, I’ve not been in this situation and don’t have first hand information and only know what others have told me in their unique situations.</p>
<p>Earlier you wrote that “You can tell creditors to leave you alone also and just take your credit hit also. They can’t force you to pay this loan I think, they can just ruin your credit.” Now you’re saying that “creditors can’t keep calling you for payment if you tell them to stop calling.” Do you see the difference? Yes, the FDCPA prohibits creditors from contacting you, if you notify them in writing that you no longer wish to be contacted. But in no way does that mean that they must “leave you alone.”</p>
<p>If the debt is legitimate, avoiding the problem or telling the creditor to cease contact will likely just make things worse. By worse, I mean that instead of engaging in a negotiation to set up a reasonable payment plan, the debtor will probably be facing a law suit where court costs (and possibly attorney fees as well) will now be added onto the debt, not to mention the non-monetary costs of being a defendant in a civil suit.</p>
<p>If the debt is not legitimate and you ignore the creditor or exercise your non-contact rights under the FDCPA, you could end up like your friends who went through divorces, and take a credit hit that you shouldn’t have taken.</p>
<p>There’s a lot of talk about “the grandfather” and his $70K income and how “he” is raising the children here. He does have a wife, and she does have some kind of income in addition, although they have (keeping it vague, as usual) said that it is “less” than his. If nothing else, he seems to be very adept at staying on message and avoiding all of those pesky details that might muddy the waters and make the family look less sympathetic. And there seems to be no evidence than anyone is asking those questions, or investigating the back story.</p>
<p>What I have read says that they own the church that he is the head of, and she is a director in. As a small business, it was probably used as collateral to co-sign the loan. Their son also works in the church.</p>
<p>They do a lot of charity work too (do a search on them and you’ll see). They have a fancier website than many small businesses have.</p>
<p>The ultimate message here isn’t “big mean lenders”. The ultimate message here is “don’t assume anything”.</p>
<p>So: “how can they ask grieving parents for money for their dead daughter’s education?” is mitigated by “you signed a contract, you should follow it”.</p>
<p>We just don’t know enough details to say who was wrong or right. I would say if he is right - that is, he cannot pay his daughter’s debt on his salary and assets - then the lender was wrong to let him co-sign and that should be taken into consideration BUT the loan was made.</p>
<p>I strongly doubt that the church is a small business which they “own.” They did start it, and it does employ three members of the family. But it also seems to employ several other people. (Of course, with churches, some of these positions might have a token stipend.) And they would have to be nuts to set things up so that their congregants couldn’t deduct the donations, and HE couldn’t take every cent he can justify as housing costs tax free. They do not seem to have a church building, so even if they did “own” it I doubt that there would be anything that could be used as collateral.</p>
<p>Some mega church type ministers make a fortune. Most ministers do not. </p>
<p>@MiddKidd86
I understand he owes the money but don’t believe anyone else like the grandmother or the children can be forced to pay the debt. is that correct? So he can try to negotiate a deal of a payment he can afford and when he dies the debt dies too? If he exercises his rights, they can still haul him into court and the court can garnish his wages but they won’t force him to pay $2000 a month I assume and will reduce it based on the family income and dependents. They can’t take his car or home but can they take your investments or 401K? I don’t think so. What is the assessment for the worst case for him and the best case for him legally?</p>