<p>How much student debt is 16,000 dollars (roughly)? Is it a moderate amount, a low amount, or a high amount? That is what I will end up with if I graduate in 4 years. I am going to study engineering.</p>
<p>That’s a $185/month loan payment for ten years.</p>
<p>The average undergrad loan amount is $20,000 so that’s better than average. If your starting salary is about $48,000, then you’ll get about $4,000/month gross. You can take out taxes, rent, car expenses, food, clothing, etc. to see what your budget will look like. If you work during the summer and take a part-time job during the year (not your first semester), you might be able to make a dent in that loan amount while you are in school.</p>
<p>I would think that coming out of a school like Northwestern, you’ll probably be able to land a job with a higher than average starting salary. If you live in, say NYC, your rent and COL will be high, but you may likely not have a car (payments, gas, parking costs, etc). If you go on to grad school, you might be able to defer loan payments until your education is complete. That size loan is manageable. Many, MANY moons ago I had a student loan I was paying off after grad school. I vividly recall the $106/mo payments, and celebrated the day when the loan was paid off, and it was on a salary that back then was reasonable, but not close to what you should be able to make (yes COL was cheaper “back then” too…)</p>
<p>Only 16K in four years and an engineer? Let’s do it. Don’t even worry about work study or summer job, if you don’t want to. That’s my personal experience, not some academic advice.</p>
<p>Work-study helps you to get summer jobs and internships and work-study, summer jobs and internships give you a leg up in the job market, especially when times are tough like right now. Things might be a lot better in four years but employers will pick those with work experience, especially relevant work experience, all other things being equal.</p>
<p>I missed the part about your being in engineering. Your starting salary (assuming the economy rcovers by the time you get out) will make it easy to handle that loan. What kid of engineering will you be pursuing?</p>
<p>If you have school-based loans, you probably have a work study job, but not sure that I agree that a job sitting at a desk in the library (for example) will really help land a summer internship or look impressive on a resume, though agreed work history is a good thing to have on a resume. I assume NU has a great system for helping with internship/job placement (career placement center, job/internship fairs, etc), and those are great ways to land summer internships. My s did not do any work study, and had wonderful summer internships (as an enginnering major) his soph and jr year.</p>
<p>okay so it is a reasonable amount then…</p>
<p>maybe it took me by surprise because i’ve never owed more than $10 in my life</p>
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<p>I don’t think so for engineering. I think an engineering graduate from most any school will earn about the same as an engineering graduate from any other school as long as they work in the same location.</p>
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<p>You can probably pay it back assuming you graduate in engineering (not an easy feat). However, if you could find a cheaper school that allows you to graduate without loans, or you could earn enough in the summer and living at home, you may be able to graduate without loans which will open more doors for you.</p>
<p>Maybe it will take some getting used to having an engineer’s salary too.</p>
<p>Make sure you graduate in 4 years!!! Fifth years get very expensive.</p>
<p>Obviously, it depends. That said, another way of looking at it is asking adults how old were they before they had cash savings of 16K. For many, the answer is … never.</p>
<p>16K debt is buying a basic Honda Civic</p>
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<p>Sort of. But if you figure in the interest that you will pay in paying off the 16k debt, it’s more like a Toyota 4Runner.</p>
<p>bigtrees,
Starting salarys for engineers can range a lot, depending on the employer and industry. I have also been told that engineers with higher GPAs are more desirable, and companies will pay for that. I am surmising that this would also be true with respect to taking the institution the student trained at into consideration in the offer. My s had 4 job offers (back when the economy was good) during his 1st month of his sr yr of college, with salaries ranging from $45K with no additional perks to $80K plus signing bonus and relocation costs. The offers that were made after internships also varied from student to student, within the same company. BCEagle, you are an engineer- your thoughts?</p>
<p>I just put in the relatively conservative amount of $48,000 because it was divisible by 12 and the type of engineering wasn’t specified. I’d volunteer numbers if it were software engineering but I’m not familiar with the other types. Better numbers would be had in the engineering forum.</p>
<p>It is a reasonable amount for an engineering student. If you’re economical during your early years, you should make bigger payments to get it paid off quickly so that you can then move on to buying a home, etc.</p>
<p>I’m an engineer and my company doesn’t differentiate pay based on the school that they graduated from. The have narrow pay bands and all new hires start within those bands. They may alter pay based on experience (research, internships, etc) but not based on school. We hire enough engineers that what we do is the industry norm.</p>
<p>Private colleges want you to think that if you go to Northwestern you will get hired by Lockheed (not my company) for $80k but if you go to a State University you will get hired by Lockheed for only $60k. But that’s not how it works. An engineer graduation from either of the two companies would probably get hired at the same amount, maybe only different by $1k or $2k.</p>
<p>It is a lot less than my 120k debt.</p>
<p>There is a great table of engineering salaries in this article [Do</a> Elite Colleges Produce the Best-Paid Graduates? - Economix Blog - NYTimes.com](<a href=“http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/do-elite-colleges-produce-the-best-paid-graduates/]Do”>Do Elite Colleges Produce the Best-Paid Graduates? - The New York Times) half way down. Its from Payscale.com</p>
<p>Skywalker23, My son graduated last May from UVa as an engineer with about that amount of debt(it was about 15,000 plus interest). He paid off the loans completely last month(and seemed quite proud of himself when he told us he had done so). They were unsubsidized Stafford loans.Lived with 3 other guys from college, made larger payments than were required,etc). It seems quite doable for an engineer making good money right out of college.</p>