<p>Kids need no parents’ signature when they borrow through the Direct (formerly Stafford) or Perkins loan programs.</p>
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<p>As I read the article, the author is not advocating students borrowing until they are “in debt over their heads”: </p>
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<p>I am making sure and continue to make sure that my adult student have an IRRATIONAL aversion to debt. No debt, period. Mortgage shoud be paid within about 10 years, car should be paid within about 10 months, and NO STUDENT LOANS. Cannot afford buying cheese, do not buy it. I will let others support economy. </p>
<p>It should be a balance. If it was not for me, others would not have enough money to borrow. I understand both ways and both should be supported. Some live without debt, so more money is available for those who love to borrow and support economy (including education as one of the services that they buy) using borrowed funds.</p>
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<p>To be clear, I don’t know anything about Marquette or Tulsa either, so I’ll simply be invoking your example. If what you are saying is true, then the onus is then on Tulsa to improve its graduation rate. If Tulsa wishes to enforce tough academic standards, then they should concomitantly stop admitting so many students who are unable to meet those standards. The general watchword principle ought to be: why should a school admit students who are likely to perform poorly? {As to how they would know whether such students would perform poorly, a predictive statistical model could be built with information compiled on past admiteees. If certain students with certain traits seem to consistently perform disproportionately poorly, then the answer is to then admit fewer students with such traits in the future.} Another option might be for Tulsa to simply not charge tuition (or charge only a reduced price) for those students who fail to graduate. For example, one could imagine a ‘balloon payment’ for the actual Tulsa bachelor’s degree itself, coupled with a relatively low per-term fee. {You could also institute a pro-rated balloon payment for those students who accumulate Tulsa credits and then transfer them to another school. Tulsa could simply demand that if the student then doesn’t pay the pro-rated balloon payment, then they won’t receive an official transcript that credits them with their Tulsa coursework.} </p>
<p>The upshot is that, whether we like it or not, nowadays you need a college degree to survive the HR screening process to even garner an interview for many decent jobs. If you lack that degree - perhaps because you attempted a difficult curriculum at Tulsa - employers won’t care why. All they’ll see is that you lack the degree and so you won’t even get the callback for the interview.</p>
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<p>Well, if you want to be truly irrationally averse to debt, then why stop there? Why not never take a mortgage or a car loan? Why not always buy everything - including your house and your car - strictly with cash? Of course in most housing markets that probably means not being able to afford a house until probably your 40’s, or perhaps never buying one at all.</p>
<p>And a strict policy of never taking student loans essentially bars you from certain careers. I can think of many current or past medical students who attended a wide range of medical schools, and while some of them graduated with less debt than others, I struggle to think of a single one who graduated with zero student debt. Merit-scholarships to medical school are few and far between, and even the rare ones that do exist hardly ever provide a full ride (including living costs). A strict policy of student debt essentially means that practically nobody other than the wealthy could ever become doctors.</p>