<p>I attended a college that offered me a full merit scholarship - tuition, fees, room, and board. I borrowed about $10K in undergrad to pay for incidentals - transportation, computer, spending money, books, that kind of thing.</p>
<p>Now I’m in a fully funded PhD program. I borrowed about $14K here to pay for relocation expenses and other things as such. (I probably borrowed a little too much, honestly. I’ve been here for 3 years.)</p>
<p>So my combined debt is $24K, including capitalized interest on my unsubsidized undergraduate loans to date, and I don’t anticipate having to borrow any more money. Finaid.org says that’s about $276 a month for 10 years (although it’s a little off because my interest rates range from 1.76% to 6.8%) I plan to be on the 10-year standard repayment plan, but depending on what kind of job I get, I may be able to pay them down faster. There are also loan repayment programs for people in the field I’m in - I do health disparities research so there’s one for that, and I’m considering joining the Navy as a research psychologist and they have loan repayment as well.</p>
<p>If I could do it over again I would’ve borrowed less in college and grad school - I probably didn’t need everything I borrowed. But I would go to the same places. It is so totally worth not facing crushing debt when I graduate. Even if I end up adjuncting I can still afford to pay my loans. If I had not won that scholarship, I would’ve attended my state’s flagship university (UGA) on a HOPE scholarship.</p>
<p>I intend to start saving for my children’s (child’s?) college funds as soon as they are born.</p>
<p>I had zero debt from undergrad back in the stone age. Tuition scholarship, parents paid room and board. I worked jobs to have car, gas, clothing, fun money.</p>
<p>DS has just begun paying back about 21K all in Staffords for his undergrad and masters degrees. About $240/month I think for 10 yrs. I’m not really sure since he’s set up online auto debit payment on them. I’m happy I’m removed from HIS loan repayments.
His job easily covers that amount, I don’t know if he will try to pay off faster.</p>
<p>We paid the remainder of his costs for the two degrees from savings, current income and a small 15K ish loan we hope to retire shortly. We also would not agree to sign or co-sign for large loans. But that’s just us.</p>
<p>I don’t see how your mother can legally make you pay Parent PLUS loans. She is the one who took them out, not you. She will be on the hook. </p>
<p>She should not have taken out the loans if she didn’t want to/couldn’t pay them back. It’s not fair for her to expect to push them off on you. PLUS loans are subject to a credit check. If she applied with her credit conditions and not yours, then the loans are her problem.</p>
<p>Talking to people, especially 16/17 year old students about money can be a very touchy subject. Talking to their parents, can be even worse because many of them feel that their financial situation is none of your business.</p>
<p>As for me and mine, my daughter finished undergrad with ~3500 in debt, that she borrowed the year that she studied abroad. She will finish law school with about 50k in debt, because I was in the position to help to defray some of her cost (hell, I was still in the check writing mode, had not yet transitioned to having a couple of extra dollars because of not paying for school, so I just continued living the way I lived while she was in undergrad).</p>
<p>However, in my professional life, I give information to my students about financial aid, but it is not my place to impose my values on to my students or their parent. It is definitely not my place to tell someone else’s parent how to spend their money or that their values should be in alignment with mine.</p>
<p>I operate from a standpoint of talking to my students about having a financial safety firmly in place. We talk about the FAFSA, the have the EFC grids, they have the information to sit with their parents to estimate a TAP award. we talk about the CSS profile, non-custodial profile, we talk about the school’s common data set, project on student debt and sitting with their families about using the net price calculators. But at the end of the day, all we can do is give advice, we cannot make anyone take the advice that we are giving.</p>
<p>If I had a $1 for every time I spoke with a student and their parents about their college list and informed them that these schools do not meet 100% demonstrated need, and the family said, don’t worry, we can pay for it (when I know that they are living in the projects and receiving public assistance and free lunch). Some of them don’t have any concept how crippling 6 figure undergrad debt can be. Like many of the other young people who post on CC, they believe that someone is magically going to loan a 17 year old $200k for their dream school.</p>
<p>At our high school, the GCs are NOT ALLOWED to inquire about family finances. They can give students advice about where they might qualify for merit awards and which schools give need based aid…and they can give any student the “how to” info for any state low income aid. BUT they are NOT permitted to know about or ask about individual family finances.</p>
<p>Never mind that there are several thousand colleges with financial aid policies that are ALL over the planet.</p>
<p>I graduated in 1985 with do debt (worked my way through, lived at home) and, thankfully, my husband’s employer has a generous tuition reimbursement program, and he has gotten his BS with no debt and is now working on his MBA. So grateful that we do not have to take on this expense, as we now have 2 kids in college. Our daughter is in her 4th year at a state university and has no debt. We have been able to pay her tuition and she has commuted, saving room and board costs for all 4 years. Our youngest is now a freshman at our state flagship university. Thanks to $15,500 in merit scholarships this year, our costs have been manageable, paying what amounts to his room and board. Two of his scholarships are not renewable, but he will still have $13,500 in scholarships for each year. It is important to us to help our kids get out of college with no debt and as of today we are able to do it.</p>
<p>“I don’t see how your mother can legally make you pay Parent PLUS loans. She is the one who took them out, not you. She will be on the hook.”</p>
<p>She can’t, but I have a good relationship with my mother and I’d like to keep it that way. Her condition of me going to a private, OOS college was that I’d pay back the PLUS loans myself. We were looking at Sallie Mae, too, but the interest rate they offered us was ridiculous and I guess her protective instincts kicked in then. Whether it’s fair…Idk, to me it is irrelevant. It is what it is.</p>
<p>Well, if her protective interests were really activated, she would have told you “no” to the expensive OOS school and not strung you along by making you promise to pay off debt you didn’t understand. Adult parents should not make teenage wishes to attend college X the basis of their financial plans. If she could not say no to you in this regard, she ought to take the consequences, man up and pay the loan.</p>
<p>If she took out loans she had no intention of repaying, she is lying to the bank. No 18-year-old has sufficient credit to take out as much in loans as your mother expects you to pay. Any bank would know that.</p>
<p>I am sorry you are in this situation. Your mother was very foolish and really let you down.</p>
<p>I don’t really think that’s fair. I’m not some naive kid who had no idea what I was getting into. I agonized over this for a long time, but honestly, my options were very limited. I guess my mom could have forced me to go to the school I got into that offered good aid, but she knew I wouldn’t be happy there. If I could have taken on the loans myself, I would have, but as you said, that simply wasn’t/isn’t an option.</p>
<p>Francis, what year are you in and what is your major? Do you know what your monthly payments will be and will someone be helping you with living expenses while you’re paying down your debt? Why were your options so limited?</p>
<p>I’d be very concerned too, and wouldn’t have allowed this with my kids. The problem is that I know how unlikely it is that my kids would be able to afford the monthly payments on that kind of debt and still afford food, shelter, transportation, taxes, insurances and all of the other expenses that adults have. I know how unhappy that level of student loan debt would make them during their adult life and how it would affect their choices, not just on what jobs to take and where to vacation, but on important things like whether to go to grad school, when to marry and have children, and how to buy a house. I know how likely it is that they would have to request lower payments or forbearance for at least some of their loans during the early years and that compounding interest can cause loans to balloon. I would have said no and sacrificed their college experience in order to avoid that even if it made me the worst mom on the planet.</p>
<p>Edited to add, I see you’re a freshman at NYU and Pell-eligible. I would strongly urge you to transfer to a more affordable school now. You are not in a position to sustain this level of borrowing and your Mom may not be either. What would happen if she doesn’t qualify for Plus loans after the first year? You are not only risking your own financial future, but hers as well!</p>
<p>^^I agree with this although legally her mother is still the one that is on the hook for the PLUS but this is not a good situation and risky situation and I question whether it is sustainable.</p>
<p>francis…
you are not legally responsible for your mom’s loans that she took out for your education - but you are morally responsible to pay them back because you agreed to do so. she caved to your desires to go to your dream school - but you are now starting to realize how high the price is.</p>
<p>The $25,000 or so of federal loans are the most I would advise. Depending on how they are structured it should be less than $300 a month for a decade so by the time the kids are in their early thirties they should have been able to pay most of it off and hopefully have a deep appreciation of their education. Kids have a difficult time fathoming a decade and what that means. It makes me sad to hear anecdotal reports of kids with massive debt although I don’t understand how they can accumulate that much debt. The sad truth is starting salaries are not necessarily tied to the college they are tied to the industry and the region in almost every case and 4 years of pleasure might not be a good tradeoff for ten years or more of hefty debt payouts. Investment banking maybe being the outlier. But even that industry is super shaky right now. I did not have any college loans but my husband did and he had his paid off by age 31. I don’t know how much they were in total but I remember writing the checks after we married and it was about $50 a month back in the mid-eighties.</p>
<p>You had a dream school you had to go to and your convinced your mother and yourself that the debt was manageable when it really wasn’t (by either one of you—here is where your mother should have played the part of the adult and said no). That is magical thinking, and yes, it is naive. The best thing right now is for you to do is what other posters in #30 and #31 suggest. Transfer to a more affordable place ASAP and do not pile on any more debt. Good luck to you and your mom.</p>
<p>I don’t think GCs should talk about their students’ parents’ finances - but they most certainly CAN explain the scholarship process and encourage them to apply to outside scholarships that are based on merit or a written essay, etc. - non-aid-based scholarships. But from my experience many GCs seem clueless to even that process, which is quite sad since many high school students might not realize these other opportunities exist.</p>
<p>Francis -
I have about $65-70k in student loans total. I didn’t get the best job in the world, but I am managing them just fine and making above the minimum payments on all of them. I don’t regret it at all - I loved the school I went to, it was the best option for me. That and my parents and pretty much everyone else in my life were completely clueless about college, so they offered no financial guidance to me at all. Again, I still don’t regret it.</p>
<p>If the 33k is in your name, I assume they are Stafford loans? Subsidized or unsubsidized? What I’ve been doing is applying for forbearance on my Staffords because the interest is extremely low, so I have been putting all of my money toward the private loans and getting them paid off sooner. You want to focus the most on the ones with the higher interest so you are not paying a lot more for them in the long run.</p>
<p>If you are unsure about your future and are that uneasy about your loans, transfer to a cheaper school. If not, and you’re happy, then stay. I will have my loans paid off in 10 years or less. But my situation may be very different from yours and where you end up.</p>
<p>I might add that I only work 35 hours a week. If I dropped down and paid only the minimum on my loans and worked the full 40+ hours a week, I could afford to move out, pay my car loan and car insurance (since I’m already paying these on top of my loans) and still have some extra left over at the end of the month. Or I could pick up a second part-time job, but I have other things going on in my life and I have chosen not to do that. I’d rather send in as much as I can to pay them down while I have a place to stay.</p>
<p>Thanks, everyone. I will definitely take the advice people have given me into consideration. I realize now that I was unrealistic throughout the college process - it was a huge mistake to count on getting into at least one top school that offered good need-based aid, and I realize that now. That being said, now that I’m here, I don’t know if I’m strong enough either to give it up or to take the risk. The only thing I know for sure is that I don’t want to slink back home in defeat. But I also understand that I need to be fiscally responsible and not put myself or my parents in a bad situation. Thanks to all of you (especially NovaLynnx, thanks for sharing, your story makes me feel a bit better) for the kind advice.</p>
<p>We explain the financial aid process. We advise them to read the fine print regarding merit aid. We distribute information about and inform students about scholarship opportunities. Most importantly, we explain to students that this is their process and the importance of having a financial safety in place.</p>
<p>I said, “from my experience,” meaning none of my GCs (I had 4 different ones) explained anything at all at any point about the financial aid process. Even during personal meetings, all they did was tell me my grades and ECs were good and asked where I was applying.</p>