I would feel like I committed parental malpractice if I let my son sign on for this kind of debt.
Agree with @SouthFloridaMom9
The parents should be ashamed.
Hmm, from this vantage point, does anyone else think the fire at the family home could be suspicious? 
^^^
Wow…makes ya think!!!
<<< would feel like I committed parental malpractice if I let my son sign on for this kind of debt.>>>
And worse, hid it from him.
I often wonder why parents who are earning MORE than newish grads think that the newish grad can afford huge payments when they (the parents) can’t afford to pay hardly anything or nothing towards college.
this guy has been paying towards this debt for several years now, yet he’s hardly put a dent into the debt.
If he started undergrad in 2003, then he’s around age 30…correct…with no end in sight for this debt. He’s supposed to go thru his 30s, the years that most people are marrying and supporting famiiies with this sort of debt. I don’t know why he doesn’t almost hate his parents.
I guess we can see why he was able to be fooled…his parents are still fooling him.
I’m pretty sure my son has never looked at his college bills. I don’t think he’s that unusual.
I think if I mentioned any topics remotely related to Sallie Mae to DS when he was an UG student, I would not be able to get his attention at all. Granted he did not owe any student loan debt at the UG level, so of course it was not his concern. However, frankly, I am not sure how much he knows about Sallie Mae and financial aids even at the grad school level. We have likely logged into school’s Bursar’s account and Sallie Mae account 10 times more frequently than he has in the past. This is just how it works in our family. I think he trusts us enough that we would not intentionally do anything that will be financially bad for him. But I think he knew he now carries quite a significant amount of student loans now. Even though we have been working hard to limit his total loan amount to as low level as we could, it will be still be quite large.
I would NEVER have had my kids take loans without knowing exactly what the amounts were. This family apparently did so.
My kids knew their loan amounts…every penny.
@thumper1 You wouldn’t do that because you’re honest and reasonable. Sadly, there must be some parents who are so “presige focused,” that they will stoop so low as to fool their child into signing additional loans.
Perhaps the parents were sloppy and careless about financial matters, and the kid learned the same habits from them.
ack! *prestige focused
@ucbalumnus I agree that the parents were likely careless about financial matters. Sloppy? I’m not sure. They carefully choreographed loan-signing, mail-hiding, loan-mentioning, Granny signature hiding, for years.
I think these are people who want what they want and they’ll do what they need to get it. I don’t recall any mention in the article that the parents (who should be well-past any lingering house-fire issues) are putting their big-boy pants on and helping pay for any of this. In fact, they didn’t even help him re-finance to a better rate.
Ugh. I’m proudly liberal and while I do think there are many financially related problems with higher education, this guy should have to pay every penny just for being such a whiney brat.
I don’t believe for a second the theory that his parents and the financial aid office had some weird conspiracy to trick him into taking out a surprising 100k on loans. He vaguely waves away things he doesn’t want to know, that’s the real problem. You see it all of the time on this website when long time posters ask kids how they are going to pay for their dream schools. They swat you away like you are a fly just trying to ruin their day. They say money doesn’t matter, they deserve this, everyone has debt, etc. they don’t know what they don’t because they don’t want to. They don’t think they should have to.
Yes, it’s way too easy to rack up huge amounts of debt. It shouldn’t be that easy. But when someone blames everyone else and takes no responsibility, only feeling sorry for himself, he’s lost all of my sympathy. He doesn’t need it anyway, he feels so sorry for himself he doesn’t need anyone else’s sympathy.
200k in loans with a job that doesn’t pay even close to 6 figures… that sucks. The only way to justify a profession at an elite school is for it to make more than 100,000k a year.
When I read articles like this, and the people say they were “unaware of the amount of their debt” - I am just shaking my head. How can one be “unaware” of their total debt?? That is the problem! I mean how do you go to school for 4 years and keep adding on to your debt, and not know the total bill? My kids are paying through a combo of summer jobs/ school jobs/ and our 529 savings but you better believe they know every line item billed amount. My daughter recently called to ask about the school deducting 50 cent service fee from a scholarship that got sent to the bank to be e-refunded. People just don’t pay attention to what schools bill when it is being “paid for” by loans.
IMO he is lying. Without the lie there would be no article. Does Slate pay for articles? Is this his way of supplementing his low salary? Being a “bioethicist” I would think his “ethics” would be important.
Also true for another reason - in the early 2000s, before student loan reform and Direct loans, federal Stafford student loans were guaranteed by private lenders. I have some federal loans that were administered through Sallie Mae. When I walked into the financial aid office in 2004, I was asked to select a student loan administrator out of a list of about 3-5. Nobody had told me that this was the deal and I didn’t know a lot about any of the administration companies, BUT I had heard lots of bad things about Sallie Mae, and deliberately avoided selecting them all four years. Didn’t matter - Sallie Mae ended up acquiring at least one of the companies that I did pick, so I ended up with Sallie Mae-administered loans after all. (I ended up consolidating all of my loans into a Direct federal loan in 2014, so I no longer have to worry about them).
The lines between federal loans and private loans were much blurrier then - the forms looked the same, private companies popped up on both forms, and private loans were much easier to get back then.
That said, while I do believe that he didn’t know what he was signing, I don’t buy the premise that his parents used deception and lies to conceal him signing for the loans. Here’s what he says:
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There’s nothing in his story that indicates that his parents engaged in deception, simply that he didn’t understand his loans and didn’t ask the right questions about them. That is, at worst, simple ignorance and an unwillingness to confront the difficult questions.
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Even in 2003-2007 - a veritable Wild West of student loans - I find it very hard to believe that any financial aid office would go along with parents’ efforts to deliberately conceal debt information from an 18-year-old.
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There’s evidence of other faulty financial reasoning in here that heightens my suspicions that this was just oversight/ignorance and not outright deception. First of all, there’s the claim that the University of Wisconsin could’ve still left the student in substantial debt. UW-Madison’s total cost of attendance for a resident student in 2003 was $13,400; even if we assume increases of around $2,000 each year and assume that the student would’ve had to borrow the entire amount, that’s still about $65,000, which is a lot less than $100,000.
$100,000 in loans suggests borrowing around $25,000 per year; Conn College’s tuition was a bit over $35,000 in 2003. There’s not historical data on total cost of attendance but let’s conservatively estimate that it was $45,000. I’m also assuming that he maxed out his federal loans because he explicitly says he thought he was signing for federal money in the financial aid office. Stafford loan limits in 2003 for freshman were $2,625 per year. That means that even with the “fair amount” of grant funding the author was getting, the school was still significantly more expensive than his in-state choice of UW. In fact, even the after-grant cost of Conn College (which sounds like it was around $28,000) was still about $15,000 more per year than going to UW full-price.
Then there’s deciding to borrow $70K for a bioethics degree when he had another option (and was advised to take it) and following the advice of friends and family that he’d surely be able to repay $70K of debt + whatever he thought he had from undergrad - remember, he didn’t think he had no debt, he just didn’t realize it was $100K - with a bioethics degree. And then there’s waiting until he got a financial aid statement in the mail…I checked my balances long before my six-month grace period was up so I could plan.
I simply can’t fathom living in a world in which I sign financial documents without reading them and asking questions and checking my bursar’s account obsessively to see how much I owe, even at 18. And I went to college at the same time as the author (2004-2008). And I did it alone, with no financial help from my parents with respect to tuition or filling out financial aid forms or anything.
But, I guess part of that was fear. I know what it feels like to live on the edge - to not have enough money to cover the essentials, basic living expenses like food and rent and clothing, and not have anywhere to get it from - and I was too afraid of going there to not pay attention to these things.
Yes, Slate pays—about $350. So, LOL, I don’t think he was doing it for the big bucks.
I am wondering why he put himself out there with this story. Isn’t it embarrassing?
See, I think that’s it in a nutshell.
I, too, was completely on my own financially when I was in college. My widowed mom filled out my FAFSA forms, and back when I graduated from high school you could continue to receive your Social Security Death Benefits until age 21 if you were enrolled in college full time, so I had a some income in addition to having a pretty good work-study job, but the cost of financing my education was completely on me.
It’s wonderful to grow up in a home where you don’t have to worry about finances, but too often parents with poor financial skills pass them on to their own children. It’s the blind (and reckless) leading the blind. In many ways, it’s better to be on your own and be forced to figure this stuff out. In my case, I knew I had four years to graduate. Once my Social Security ran out, I couldn’t have afforded to go to school full time. I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to drop a class or take a break, but it just wasn’t possible if I was going to get my degree in four years.
As far as to WHY he put the story out there, I’m guessing he genuinely did it with good intentions. He’s trying to save other clueless students from making the same dumb mistakes. As shocking as it is to a lot of folks here, I think this type of thing is all too common.
And, yeah, he probably wants to embarrass the schools that he feels were complicit in his poor decision-making. I’m not sure he’s presenting the story accurately, but it can still serve as a good reality check for future families.
I do NOT have a problem with a story that highlights the issues with having that amount of loan debt for a bachelors and masters. What I DO have an issue with is where he is placing the blame.
I’m sorry, but his family really threw him under the bus…both parents and grandma. And he was well educated enough to attend Conn College, but not smart enough to do the due diligence himself regarding what he was signing.
The issue of taking $200,000 in undergrad and masters degree loans is something that is worthy of discussing.
But for the undergrad part…there is an aggregate limit of $57,000 or so that this student could have taken in his own name. Anything above that…well…as I’ve said…his family is to blame here.
This story reads like Mommy Dearest. Tells the story of parents who should be blamed…but doesn’t actually mention that…just infers that.
Wondering what his parents are saying about this story?
From the article: " I didn’t really understand what these loans were or what repaying them would actually entail"
I think the key words are “or what repaying them would actually entail”.
I honestly don’t think kids (especially at 17) think that far ahead and are able to put actual numbers down on paper to figure out what a monthly payment for student debt will be and how it will impact their life after graduation or for how long. I don’t think many adults bother to figure it out either. “I’ll make a big salary and it’ll be worth it” is more the thinking. Shortcut thinking–I’ll make 50K a year and pay it back in 2 years–no biggie.
Nobody tells them “Your payments post graduation will be 1000 per month, your rent will be 1000, hopefully you own a clunker car. Don’t expect to eat much but macaroni without the cheese for the next 10-15 years. Goodwill has sales on alternate Wednesdays.” “Oh, don’t forget insurance and taxes when you do your monthly budget.”
By now that community college would be looking fabulous.