<p>If i'm receiving around 9,000 in loans (University loan, sub & unsub loans, PLUS loan, work study) per year, that accumulates to $36,000 + interest. Let's just assume that I will receive the same amount of financial aid. </p>
<p>Is this amount of debt normal? What is the average $ of debt an undergrad has after 4 years? What amount of debt should I strive to avoid?</p>
<p>I plan on going to grad/med school. But lets not include that in here.</p>
<p>Work-study is not a loan…It’s money you are expected to earn from an on-campus job. </p>
<p>You can cut down debt by scrimping (cheaper room/board plan, used books) and earning more (summer job, schoolterm job)</p>
<p>I don’t think $36k is a terribly large amount, but do consider the career you want to go into. A ibanker has much more earning potential than an English major…</p>
<p>$36K sounds awfully large to me. Go to one of the calculators and figure out how much you’d be paying, month in and month out, for decades. Add the debt you’ll take on for grad/med, and you won’t be free and clear until you’re in your 50s. Being in debt = indentured servitude. Minimize it as much as you possibly can.</p>
<p>BTW, the PLUS loan is a parent loan, and fiona is correct, work study is work, not debt. So, assuming your parents will handle the PLUS loan, your personal debt may not be nearly as much as you think.</p>
<p>Ahh yeah forgot work-study is not a loan. So for work-studies, if I make the amount that is listed on the fin. aid package, do I have to quit the job or am I allowed to continue?</p>
<p>And I plan to major in perhaps neurobiology and hopefully get into med…</p>
<p>$22K is the average. You need to expect that your loans will go up each year as the maximums becomes higher. You’ll end up borrowing considerably more than the $36K at most schools.</p>
<p>If it’s Wharton and you’re planning a business career, maybe. But it would not be sensible IMO for most colleges/programs.</p>
<p>Since so many kids start out pre-med and end up not going to med school, it might be wise to limit your undergrad debt to an amount you can comfortably handle with a bachelor’s degree. A $36,000 debt would require payments around $400/month for 10 years.
[FinAid</a> | Calculators | Loan Calculator](<a href=“Your Guide for College Financial Aid - Finaid”>Your Guide for College Financial Aid - Finaid)</p>
<p>I think the posters who advise students not to incur too much debt are technically correct, but are not facing the reality that many, many students are finding themselves in debt after graduation.</p>
<p>Even top students in my high school are finding it necessary to take on some loans to pay for college, even after nice scholarships. The cost is just so high and neither merit or need-based aid is covering the entire cost for most students.</p>
<p>My friends who are “just average” get little to nothing for college and will be taking out loans of $15000 (including parent loans) or so just to go to a state school.</p>
<p>I think students routinely take on large loans assuming they will get a better job and be able to pay it back easily. Right or wrong, they’ve been persuaded to think that’s normal.</p>
<p>I just feel that sometime the posters here don’t realize how many young people out there are deep in debt from college.</p>
<p>I think many parents DO realize it, and are trying to cut down on that number by advising students here not to take on too much debt. Parents know how confining debt can be, so caution against having a lot of it.</p>
<p>My son will take on some debt for school – $5K/year for each of the first two years, and perhaps a matching amount for the last two years, for a total of $20K. I would not want him to take more than that, and more importantly, he knows that he should not borrow a lot. If that means he has to finish his undergrad at a less expensive school, that’s what he’ll do.</p>
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<p>Quite the opposite. I think a lot us see another mortgage-type disaster in the making.</p>
<p>I don’t consider myself a soothsayer, but I’ve been expecting major trouble with regard to mortgages for at least three years, based on the houses I saw people I know, with relatively low incomes, buying. I see the same thing happening with student loans. Young people are vastly overestimating the income they will be making for the first 10 years after college. </p>
<p>One of my kids took a major scholarship (to a very fine school, so he was lucky) to avoid any debt. The next one wants to go to vet school eventually, and she seems to have decided that a good program at a public is fine with her. In my eyes they are smart and mature.</p>
<p>I realize not everyone has what seems like good options, and that puts them in a difficult position. Debt is crippling, though. It will impact your future freedom.</p>
<p>I think parents are well aware of the problem. The GCs at my Ds school (a great public HS) are excellent – and every step of the way make certain kids are aware of financial issues. I suspect that some of the mediocre HSs are so anxious to put up a better list of where kids have been accepted they downplay financial issues.</p>
<p>^^^kayf, </p>
<p>Our state has mandated a one-semester personal finance class for all public high school students. This year is Year One of the program, so the details of the curriculum are still being worked out. Our local district decided that students had to take it during junior year, which annoyed me because I thought it would work out better at the end of the senior year. As it turns out, the first subject covered was college debt. Then, they returned to it again, later in the semester. I now think junior year is a good time to take this course, after all.</p>
<p>hmom, do you really think that 22k is still the average amount? Now that students can elect to borrow and extra 2k unsubsidized, over the “base amount”, which may be unsubsidized, or subsidized, that adds up to 27,000. My guess is that most, with the exception of the most elite schools include all 27k to “meet financial need”. This does not cost them a dime in grant money, yet it counts as meeting need! I have not even touched the Perkins Loans that are offered to meet need, or the W/S offers for jobs that many students cannot find (depends upon the campus). Additionally, I have not mentioned the “side deals” where students are made responsible for private loans to help meet their family’s efc and/or the amount that they have been gapped!</p>
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<p>midmo, I agree, but I do think that schools should know the average income of their graduates. I have been to several info sessions where dollar figures have been thrown out to prospies, so they are keeping track of this. Wish that would figure into the amount of loans that they suggest to “meet need”.</p>
<p><a href=“https://ifap.ed.gov/dpcletters/attachments/GEN0808AttachA.pdf[/url]”>https://ifap.ed.gov/dpcletters/attachments/GEN0808AttachA.pdf</a></p>
<p>Northeastmom, you may well be right, but this is the number I still see everywhere including recent articles in the NYT. The new number probably will not be reported until next year.</p>
<p>The other thing I see everywhere is that the number of students defaulting has been going up every year. It is totally out of control and these kids won’t get to buy homes or cars or much of anything else as student lenders are protected like no others. Bankruptcy will not discharge the debt. They tax their tax refunds, pay checks and everything else.</p>
<p>Playbass, your friends are choosing the wrong schools if they are taking on big debt. Most 18 year olds just don’t know how it will impact their future. Most also don’t seem to understand that at most colleges the loans go up and grants go down every year. </p>
<p>Kid’s need to be digging deep for schools that offer good need based and merit aid, and if that doesn’t work out they need to start at community college or a low cost state school.</p>
<p>I also don’t know that average salaries are helpful, what students need to know is average salary for their major. High starting wages for a few majors like engineering and accounting will skew numbers at schools that offer those majors. Average numbers may be more helpful at LACs.</p>
<p>The loans reported are usually those offered through financial aid. There are families and students who are taking outside loans as well. Also parent loans are not included in those figures. It is frightening to me how much in debt some of these kids are, and parents as well. These loans are like mortgages, stretching out for 14 years after the student starts college. We took some this past year, and are hoping to avoid PLUS next year. </p>
<p>It’s a tough call for a parent who has a good kid who has gotten into a school he wants but he needs to come up with more money than the family can afford and that includes taking out the amount of loans needed to make the costs. It’s not unusual that a kid doesn’t not understand the implications of borrowing large amounts. I’ve seen families torn because the student wants to go regardless of cost and debt, and the parents are balking. Usually, the sticking point is that the student needs a cosigner for the loans and the parents feel that the amount is more than they afford, and that it is more than the student will be able to afford too. The problem with cosigning is that you should not cosign anything that you are not willing and able to assume should something happen. this is a dispute that causes a lot of heart breaks. What to say to an 18 year old who is sure he can pay off $80K after he graduates? Hard to say “no” when this is a kid who has been reasonable about things and has done all he should to get into the school of choice. </p>
<p>I blame the colleges and the whole system for the heavy PR that is put out there that you CAN go anywhere you want. The world is your oyster. There are scholarships and financial aid, and anyone who gets into HPY will find a way to pay for it. It would be difficult to get some of these top school folks to say that a family should limit the app process excluding their schools if the parents know they cannot afford it. The general air is that it’ll work out somehow. Well, we are now in the season where we can see the “somehow” and often it involves some risky and irresponsible financial risks that are placed in front of an 18 year old kid as his choice.</p>
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<p>I was speaking with a college prof/administrator last week about this. He told me people should be questioning those numbers in a lot of cases. Some schools get all of their data from their school’s placement offices and nowhere else. Often it only includes those jobs generated through campus visits by employers. In a lot of cases, students who get no job offers at all by graduation are not included in the average. Other students get jobs on their own, but do not report the salary to the placement office, so their data point is not included in the average. </p>
<p>I’d be inclined to ask about the details of how the average salary was determined.</p>
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<p>Unfortunately I am seeing it a lot this year and this can be very easily the case at SUNY where the cost of a 4 year school is around 18k a student or their family makes to much $ to be eligible for Pell & Tap, will most likely receive a package that is only work study and loans. This same family may not have enough $ to outright pay COA and will have to borrow using the stafford loan process as well as PLUS loans. So what should be the financially feasible option, this student and their family will incur at least 60k in debt over a 4 year period.</p>
<p>Remeber most schools do not meet 100% of demonstrated need. The overwhelming majority of schools give loans in their FA packages including PLUS loans (about 85% of the students on my case load have received PLUS loans as part of their FA package as a means of filling the “gap”). </p>
<p>I also have students who have received less in FA this year than students who were accepted to some of the same schools last year.</p>
<p>Am I right or is taking out $15k+ worth of loans kind of O.O.C.? (Out of Control) I am choosing between two schools and it is $8k worth of loans or $18k worth of loans. I feel with $8k in loans, I can work during the summer to relieve it.</p>
<p>Less debt, especially in the current economic environment, appears to be the prudent way to go. Focus on the finances, and the fit, not necessarily the name. Moreover, if one plans to attend graduate school, certainly adhere to the aforementioned, as grades at undergrad will generally matter more than the specific school, but the debt will burden one for a long time. Let’s learn from our current crisis.</p>
<p>I agree with Northeastmom, I think the loans are going to increase from the average amount, but it will take a few years to see. With tuitions rising and parents being even more strapped, students,especially ones in college already will take what they can and hope to pay it off as quickly as possible.
There are cheaper schools, but some community colleges are awful. One in my state, over an hour away has a decent reputation, but the only one near me is not thought highly of at all. I know quite a few students that quit of of frustration, the mis-managed classes, knowing more than their teachers, very unmotivated students, etc. I think it’s a great option, but not for all, depending on certain factors. Maybe it will change in the future, but the complaints I heard over and over, were that the students in their classes were mainly there because they couldn’t get into college, not for money reasons.</p>
<p>I was reading an article in Money Magazine about easing the tuition squeeze. There was a little visual aid about student loans. The figure that stuck out for me was that for students who took out $15+ thousands of dollars in loans, 20% defaulted. That is NOT how you want to start out your working adult life!</p>
<p>Try to keep your loans as low as you can…</p>