<p>That may be, but there doesn’t seem to be much recourse if a person doesn’t pay them. There are a number of people who haven’t made a mortgage payment in years and the bank hasn’t gotten around to foreclosing on them. But it will happen someday. </p>
<p>But with educational loans, what’s there to foreclose on? If it’s a federal loan, your tax refund will go to paying off the loan. But otherwise? I know of one person who probably has over $150K of student loans that she’s just quit paying on. They’ll never be discharged, but they’ll never be paid off. They are like zombies…</p>
<p>It will limit their ability to take on other loans, most notably a mortgage. And if an employer looks into their credit history, it may deny them a job.</p>
<p>When analyzing the COA UG colleges for the purpose of discerning whether there is a “bubble” or whether prices are dropping - do not look at the sticker price. You have to look at the price that attendees are actually required to pay. This is very difficult because different students are required to pay different amounts, but it can be done if one controls for the variables.</p>
<p>I doubt that we will see the sticker prices drop. But we will see more financial aid from the schools that are very heavily endowed and from public universities that are motivated to provide access to their schools for certain students. We are also seeing prices for public universities continue to rise (but not for all students). Not all of the increase in public university tuition and fees is caused by the increase number of students choosing their state’s public universities. State governments are cutting back on their direct appropriations and not all of that will be address in cost cutting.</p>
<p>glido, for full-pay families the sticker price is indeed the issue. That’s why I pulled the quote from the article that I posted at the start of the thread, about how paying for education isn’t something that’s ever questioned by the well-off.</p>
<p>At the other end of the scale are financial aid students at the relatively few full-need-met schools, for whom list price is irrelevant. At these schools the list price students increasingly subsidize the needy students.</p>
<p>An Education cost bubble? Unpayable loans? RIDICULOUS!!! All a student has to do is get a job paying ten times the median family income. How hard can that be?</p>
<p>“After peaking at 25% of total education loan volume in 2006-07 and 2007-08, nonfederal loans declined to 11% of the total in 2008-09 and 8% of the total in 2009-10.”</p>
<p>“In the public and private nonprofit four-year sectors, students from
families with incomes above $120,000 are less likely to borrow,
and when they do borrow, they accumulate less debt than
dependent students from less affluent families.”</p>
<p>“Almost all students who earn four-year degrees from for-profit institutions graduate with debt. Median debt levels range from $24,600 for dependent students
from families with incomes between $30,000 and $60,000, to $34,600 for those from families with incomes between $60,000 and $90,000.”</p>