<p>This article is a good wakeup call to parents & students that think top schools will guarantee success and therefore they should pay the tuition without regard to the future. I am shocked the girl is making only $22/hour. That's $44,000/year - not what you would expect from an NYU grad, but it shows the weakness of non-technical generic Lib Arts degree. </p>
<p>Your</a> Money - Another Debt Crisis Is Brewing, This One in Student Loans - NYTimes.com</p>
<p>An interdisciplinary degree in women’s and religious studies with $100,000 in debt???</p>
<p>Also, she pays $750/month rent in San Francisco? Does she have 4 roommates?</p>
<p>This family needed a reality check a long time ago.</p>
<p>Hasn’t made payments and the interest is compounding.</p>
<p>And now regrets her decision.</p>
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<p>What percentage of students are represented by cases like this? It seems like we’re always hearing about students (almost invariably from NYU – why do people love this school so much!?) who have hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt chasing after a degree in something like “Feminist Anthropophagi in English Literature” and living in places like Manhattan and Los Angeles. How many American college graduates are actually like this? Before someone comes on here and says something like, “We should abolish the liberal arts” or “Cap all student loans at $5,000” or “Shut down NYU” I think it’s important to find out about that.</p>
<p>(Could NYU be some sort of welfare program for journalists? It seems like, if a reporter is having a slow week, she can just grab a directory of recent NYU grads and call up any one of them to find a tale of nightmarish debt, useless-sounding education, and a hideous spiral into a world of misery and death. If that school ever goes away, the New York Times might actually have to do research to find other cases of obscene student debt).</p>
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<p>Good heavens, this young lady is still financially illiterate! She’s deferred her loans, which were already too high, so she can take more classes…how is she paying for that?! She works a few nights/weekends but has not taken on a second job. She could live in upstate NY or someplace else where there actually are jobs paying similar wages (I believe this is within the range of a low level Walmart manager!) and the cost of living is a fraction of the SF area (Alex Bay is a summer tourist area and is within commuting distance to several larger cities which also have a low COL). She’s apparently not even paying the interest portion of her debt, which is a guarantee that it will snowball. She’s just making a series of bad decisions based upon what she wants to do, not what she needs to do. Imo, she does need a serious wake-up call…you don’t postpone paying your debts and hope for another way out because it “feels wrong”! What is the matter with these kids? Is this a lack of work ethic or just extreme cases of “ostrich syndrome”?</p>
<p>sk8rmom, Just curious, what “larger cities” are close to Alex Bay? I used to live in the North Country of New York State, so I am curios as to what cities you are talking about.</p>
<p>This article describes the phenomenon of “good” college “Trapping you” into paying a lot of money. This is how it goes (I’m using a different example than the article that I am more familiar with): you get accepted at Northwestern, and they offer $44,000 per year. You accept and get in debt 176,000. You graduate, and you have to get a job. Since you have an NU degree, you get a job that pays decently. But the wily college has calculated perfectly! You make enough money to keep on paying your loans, but you are stuck living a sub-standard life, deferring marriage, further studies, having fun… Anyway, you have no choice but to pay. I remember when NU reps came and someone asked about student debt. Instead of saying it’s easy to pay off, or giving a statistic about how 80% of people are debt free five years after graduation, they said that students “happily pay off their loans”. Who’s happy in debt???</p>
<p>I think financial literacy should be a requirement for HS graduation. As a finance professional, I am shocked at how little people understand about how the compounding of interest can torpedo your credit rating. IMO, the mortgage crisis might have been averted if borrowers understood what they were getting themselves into with low teaser rates. </p>
<p>My Jr daughter is taking Personal Finance as an elective this semester and I think it is probably the most practical classes she has ever taken in and should be required of all students.</p>
<p>MSM, not sure when you left us but Watertown and the area surrounding Fort Drum have grown considerably in the last decade and is only 20 miles or so from Alex Bay. For a larger city, Syracuse would also be a convenient to work while sharing an apartment during the week (and work on more classes if she can afford it) and an easy 1-1.5 hour drive home to help Mom with the B&B weekend business in return for a little help on loan payments. </p>
<p>The point is, to live in a large metro area and make $22/hour is going to guarantee she’ll never get these loans under control. She needs to find a low COL area, either in or near a smaller city, if she’s not qualified to compete for higher paying positions with her pricey degree!</p>
<p>njmom, I completely agree! High schools often offer this as an elective but it’s viewed as a “fluff” course by the honors/AP crowd at our school. I insisted that my kids take it and, coupled with decent parental training, it’s one of the best “real world” educational offerings out there. I think we really must make more of an effort to break this cycle of financial illiteracy as it’s clear that many adults, including this young woman and her mother, have no sense of what constitutes an effective financial plan or budget.</p>
<p>My daughter’s AP Lang teacher had seniors advise juniors last week on what they learned and would do differently etc. in the college search. They knew at least 3 students who were shocked that NYU and other bad FA colleges gave them. Their first bit of advice was:
Research, research, research! Even educated parents who once went through the system, somehow thought that most colleges FA was basically the same and had their son or daughter only apply to 4 or 5 colleges that weren’t guaranteed.
Even before CC (which was very helpful) there were hundreds of websites and books that explained aid, which colleges gave the most and what kind, etc.
No college is worth that much in debt unless it came with a guaranteed great paying job and no chance of layoffs!</p>
<p>She’s foolish, and all of the classes in the world probably won’t fix that. Reading what her mom had to say, it looks like it is genetic.</p>
<p>She’s also not living particularly frugally in San Francisco, and could be paying at least $500 a month toward her student loan debt by really learning how to live frugally.</p>
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<p>Yeah, but that doesn’t guarantee that everyone will listen. It seems as if around this time of year regulars on the Financial Aid and Scholarships have to argue with some kid who is insisting that she can muscle through to NYU entirely on private loans.</p>
<p>She’s foolish, and all of the classes in the world probably won’t fix that. Reading what her mom had to say, it looks like it is genetic.</p>
<p>Soooooo true. </p>
<p>Where are the adults around here? The mom was acting like an excited teen herself…Oh my D is going to graduate from NYU. oohh…</p>
<p>The mom had to be at least 37 years old when all this borrowing was going on. Did she ever “run the numbers”? did she ever think about her daughter’s future earnings? No. She was acting like the 18 year olds that we see on CC all the time who have the attitude that I’m going to borrow whatever it takes to go to my dream school. Ugh.</p>
<p>The mom was turned down for the 3rd year’s co-signed loan - What planet was she on? And, again, when the process started, did she ever think…hmm…will I even qualify for those loans in the later years??? </p>
<p>Maybe this mom never had a mortgage before, but whenever a person borrows money, they always ask what the monthly payments will be. Did this mom never think to ask? Or did she dumbly think all college grads make BIG BUCKS?</p>