<p>@kelsmom, what you do is fantastic - but quite frankly, much more than what most colleges do when it comes to student loans. I have a very reasonable student loan debt especially given that I have a PhD, but I have friends who borrowed way more than they could reasonably expect to repay even with a sweet job straight out of college. In college my face-to-face meetings with financial aid counselors involved 10 minutes for me to basically sign on the dotted line. Many of my friends received no counseling, no orientation, no face-to-face meetings with their financial aid counselor. My husband borrowed in excess of $100K for undergrad, in a combination of private and federal loans. His elderly grandmother, now deceased, cosigned for him. While the blame rests primarily on him, I wish some financial aid counselor had at least expressed a modicum of concern for how he was going to repay those loans. (He ended up dropping out and joining the Air Force. He’s back in school now to finish his BA on the GI Bill…but we still have the debt.)</p>
<p>Is that what we want? Poor kids kept out because statistic show the needy student who is going to a not-so-top college in a not-so-in-need major is 100% more likely to default than the wealthy student who didn’t need to borrow in the first place.</p>
<p>Um, that’s not what they show. The article doesn’t even discuss majors; it says that students who need remedial classes are more likely to default than students who don’t. Yes, poor students are more likely to default than wealthy students, but the majors aren’t mentioned.</p>
<p>Some colleges argue that the regulations unfairly target and penalize schools that serve “high risk” populations like the poor and young people who need remedial help. A study of nine community colleges carried out by the Association of Community College Trustees and the Institute for College Access and Success, a nonprofit research group, rebuts that argument.</p>
<p>They are the ones who LEAST need to go into default. If your college services low-income students and you have more than a 30% default rate, you’re doing them a disservice. That means that they are getting a college education and STILL don’t have the skills necessary to land a job that enables them to repay their debt…or that the college is saddling them with way more debt than they can reasonably repay.</p>