<p>An article from the Wall Street Journal:
To</a> Pay Off Loans, Grads Put Off Marriage, Children - WSJ.com</p>
<p>I wish all students who are considering taking out giant student loans would read this first!</p>
<p>i believe it is just one of those extreme cases and not painting a true picture for the majority of the students.</p>
<p>[Villainous</a> Company: A Little Perspective on Student Loan Debt](<a href=“http://www.villainouscompany.com/vcblog/archives/2012/04/a_little_perspe.html]Villainous”>http://www.villainouscompany.com/vcblog/archives/2012/04/a_little_perspe.html)</p>
<p>Borrowing among students at the median is relatively modest: zero for students beginning at community colleges, $6,000 for students at four-year public colleges, and $11,500 for students at private nonprofit colleges. </p>
<p>Even at the 90th percentile, student borrowing does not exceed $40,000 outside of the for-profit sector. </p>
<p>Examples of students who complete their undergraduate degree with more than $100,000 in debt are clearly rare: outside of the for-profit sector, less than 0.5 percent of students who received BA degrees within six years had accumulated more than $100,000 in student debt. </p>
<p>The 90th percentile of degree recipients starting at for-profits have $100,000 in debt; so a nontrivial number of students at for-profits accumulate this much debt, but the situation is still far from the norm."</p>
<p>@itsme2 – Are you including all forms of student loan debt, such as private student loans and Parent PLUS loans? Because schools don’t include those amounts when they provide information on student indebtedness. Schools only count federal student loans.</p>
<p>And this is why I am trying to avoid student loans all together. Living at home, going to a CC and paying for school out of pocket has me with zero debt after my first year.</p>
<p>megmno - i have no idea. i just quoted from an article.</p>
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<p>This may be, but there are enough young people who come on this forum and ask if it’s OK to borrow $50, 60, 70,000 and more that I’m concerned. I truly do not think most of these kids have any idea what they’re getting into, and unfortunately, many of them have parents who either don’t understand student loans either.</p>
<p>“Outside of the for profit sector” are the operative words. Look at most of the post on this board. These kids CANNOT get loans for over $5500 in most cases and need amounts far more than that. So where do you think they go? To the for profit sector, where they get a parent to co sign if the lend finds that parent credit worthy. Depending on the credit worthiness, the interest rates vary. </p>
<p>The only loans on the radars of these college services are the ones that are offered by the federal government and perhaps the colleges themselves, if they are lending to kids. So with the maximums firmly in place, of course the numbers are under the $40K level. By definition and by law, they have to be outside of the for profit sector. That’s why we have all of these kids asking where they can borrow these huge amounts–they are NOT being offered anywhere within the college financial aid offices.</p>
<p>*Borrowing among students at the median is relatively modest: zero for students beginning at community colleges, $6,000 for students at four-year public colleges, and $11,500 for students at private nonprofit colleges. *</p>
<p>That sounds like info supplied by COLLEGES. They don’t have access to how much people are borrowing from private banks.</p>
<p>The original article that itsme’s quote came from can be found in the Winter 2012 issue of [The</a> Journal of Economic Perspectives](<a href=“http://www.aeaweb.org/jep/index.php]The”>American Economic Association: Journal of Economic Perspectives). In “Student Loans: Do College Students Borrow Too Much–Or Not Enough?”, the authors argue that students need to regard college loans as a tool for obtaining greater economic benefits that come with a college degree. I went looking for their methodology on how they assessed median student indebtedness, but got distracted by the conclusions:</p>
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<p>Now, the authors teach at Harvard and UVA, schools that have a high level of degree completion and relatively sophisticated students who can see that yes, other students that matriculate to Harvard and UVA tend to do pretty darn well in life. But in my opinion it might be asking just a wee bit too much of the typical 18 year old on the verge of signing loan papers to have them possess this level of self-knowledge.</p>
<p>I thought this part of the article was particularly telling -
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<p>This type of counseling should be required before any loans are taken, especially private ones.</p>