^^^ Per year, or total over the course of 4 years?
Per year
So question is impact of $60,000 loans if you attend Syracuse and $88,000 in loans if you attend Spelman.
Plus from other thread, law school likely.
Yes. I’m pretty sure I’d be able to pay the debt off if I get into a good law school and then a high paying job.
You can’t take that much in loans anyway. Someone would have to co-sign for $10k ish a year of it.
One big key word in your last sentence of the OP is “if”. You can’t be sure that you will get a good job immediately after graduating. You don’t know what the economy will be like. You don’t know that there won’t be a personal crisis making getting a job you want, when you want possible. You don’t know how much available money you will need immediately at graduation for an apartment, furnishing, work clothes, transportation. The only thing you can know is if you have little to no debt vs a LOT of debt.
Obviously, it depends on the amount and the payment, but It often means not being able to make a car payment, or to fix your really old car, or make a mortgage payment, or to go on vacation when all your friends are posting their vacation photos on Facebook. It could mean not being able to go out to dinner with a friend or having to think twice about ordering pizza delivery. And it can follow you for a long time. When you’re 18 or 19, you don’t have a sense of how much money you need to support yourself. There’s rent, auto insurance, auto maintenance, renter’s insurance, water, sewer, garbage, heat, electricity, groceries, health insurance, gas, doctor’s bills, prescription drugs, over-the-counter medications, cable bill, telephone bill, and on and on. Then you figure a good chunk of your income goes to FICA, then income tax, then local taxes.
Then, before you know it, you want to get married and have kids and you have these huge monthly payments hanging over your head, so even if somebody wants to stay home with the baby, they can’t. They have to go to work basically just to pay for a babysitter and a student loan payment. It’s bad.
Add law school debt then too. Which is even higher cost than undergrad. And it takes quite a long time to build a law career up to being “high paying”.
You, the student, can take out a max of $27K total in federal direct student loans for the 4 years of undergrad ($5,500 freshman yr, then $6,500 soph yr, then $7,500 each of the last two years). So you still have a sizable gap to fill with another type of loan ($33K total gap for Syracuse, and $61K for Spelman). Your parents can take a parent plus loan, but that would be their debt—even if you agree to pay it back they are the ones legally responsible to make payments. You and/or they could also get private loans, but if in your name, you would need a co-signer.
I encourage you to get educated regarding the monthly payments that would go along with these levels of debt after you graduate. Use this online calculator to see what the monthly payments would be for $60K in Syracuse debt and $88K in Spelman debt. https://mappingyourfuture.org/paying/debtwizard/ Make some assumptions regarding your starting salary to see the impact of those payments on your monthly take home pay. Ask yourself if your salary would be higher, or if you will get into a better Law school, after graduating from Spelman or Syracuse as compared to Bing. Good luck.
Don’t forget to add in the price of law school. If you are looking for prestige and career advancement, Law school is the place to shoot for a top 10 school. Binghamton is very well respected and if you have excellent grades and LSAT score, you will be competitive for any law school in the country. The top 10 law schools have plenty of students from great state colleges.
Significant debt can really curtail your choices after law school. What if you decide you want to work for the US attorney’s office? Or what if you learn that you hate the practice of law. It happens to a lot of people. Its a grueling profession. Leave yourself as much freedom as possible.
Had a friend in law school who took out about $440k in loans (under grad plus law school). This impacted his relationships, because some girls just said no to the lifestyle he could afford, as well as delayed even getting a house or getting married or having kids. It is serious.
You are basically buying a car every year for four years (and paying for them over time) without having a means of transportation. And if you then go to law school, you likely will be basically buying a house (and paying for it over time) without a place to live. So you will have to pay for 4 cars and a house along with transportation, place to live, food, clothes, entertainment, healthcare, retirement savings, parking etc.
And that is without even addressing the issue noted above that you can’t borrow that much for undergrad on your own. Someone will need to co-sign for the additional debt. Are you parents willing to do that?
@bigmamao - Good point - it can absolutely affect your relationships and dating prospects, especially if you carry the debt into middle age.
And you really need to seriously think about whether law school would be a good investment. Over 75% of people who went to law school think it was a bad investment. The legal market is saturated. There is no shortage of people who graduated law school with hundreds of thousands in loans and could only find employment doing contract work at $20 an hour. Now, granted, that was 10 years ago, but when the market tanked, everyone and their brother went to law school. And when there is an over supply of lawyers, guess what? They don’t make any money. So before you make such a commitment, you need to talk to real lawyers, maybe do some work in a firm - get a real sense of what it’s like, how much people make, how much stress is involved. There’s a reason why drug addiction, alcoholism and depression rates are extraordinarily high among lawyers. Don’t go in blind.
It is very likely you will have debt for law school. Some law schools do give some aid to some top applicants…but not full rides. Law school is costly, you can’t work while you are attending…so in addition to tuition costs…you will also need to pay living expenses somehow.
But let’s forget that for now, because you could change your mind.
Bing. No loans. This means when you graduate from undergrad, your options are wide open. You could take a lower paying job with potential because you won’t have a loan bill to worry about. You might be able to love in a more desirable area…no loan payment to worry about. You might want to buy a car, go on vacation, buy new furniture…and you will likely have the resources to do so without worrying about a loan payment.
Spelman- you will MINIMALLY be taking $88,000 in loans which you will need a qualified co-signer for. Remember, college costs increase annually…so count on a 3%-5% increase per year. You will likely have over $100,000 in loan debt…because you will also have interest on these loans. Payments will be about $1200 or maybe a tad more per month…depending on interest rate. So…that is almost $15,000 in loan payments just for undergrad school for ten years. TEN years of loan debt. This will affect your ability to borrow for other things…cars, houses. Some employers will not hire folks with huge debt. Discretionary spending will need to be minimized.
Syracuse- same issues…but assume your loans will be more like $70,000 because again…there will be interest. About $850 a month in payments for ten years. Very much will limit your discretionary spending.
But you biggest issue is…who is co-signing these loans? Will they actually qualify as a co-signer for all four years? Why would you want to put your parents on the line for this when you have an excellent…NO LOAN option in Bing.
As parents, we flatly refused to co-sign or take loans for our kids to attend college. We didn’t want them burdened with huge debt we co-signed…and we absolutely didn’t want that kind of loan burden ourselves.
Vacation might not be realistic first year out of college, but without loans you’d be able to pay your rent and your auto insurance anyway. Lol!
So true! Medical schools require applicants to have experience shadowing doctors so they know what they are in for. Law school should absolutely require the same. I think there was a country song about it…“Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be lawyers…”
I have been indoctrinating my kids since birth not to go to law school. Some kindly lawyers tried to do the same for me many years ago. Unfortunately, I didn’t listen. But my kids will be spared!
Then you really have no business asking your parents to cosign huge loans for you. Go to Binghamton. It’s a solid school.
A friend of mine had only law school tuition debt (free ride to college, and for law school commuted from parent’s house). He got a job with a mid-tier firm. It’s really hard to get, and keep, a big law job so don’t count on it. Anyway, he had to commute huge distances because he couldn’t afford to live closer in to the city, and even with that his house was very modest, he drove Hondas to 200k miles, and generally lived modestly to pay off his debt. He’s now in his 50s and said he went from paying off his student loans directly to paying his kids’ college tuitions and felt like he never got a chance to get ahead.
@happyteen19 : Please consider my advice.
Do not take out any loans for undergraduate school.
Binghamton is a great school.
I will not be blunt on this thread, but I want to share that student debt can be more than financially crippling, it has very serious psychological & emotional effects as well.