<p>For a top school with great academics and an overall enjoyable college experience, what is a 'reasonable' amount of debt to incur over four years? I'd especially like to know the opinions of parents who know these kind of finances better than students. I suppose it depends on the income level of the spender, but honestly, being a child of lower middle class family (income of around 50k), I have no idea on what to base my standards on.</p>
<p>Cryptic,
I see in your profile that you are interested in med school. While many students entering as premed change their minds, if you think there’s a good chance you will go this direction, then I would advise tht you take as little debt for undergrad as possible. Four more years of med school, plus residency will make it a long time before you will be earning a substantial salary. Search some threads and you will get an idea of how much loan payments will be. Also, here are med school costs:
<a href=“http://services.aamc.org/tsfreports/[/url]”>http://services.aamc.org/tsfreports/</a>
You are fortunate being in Texas, as Baylor is one of the best and the cheapest (14k/yr) private med school. It is even cheaper than many public med schools.</p>
<p>I might give different advice if you were going into engineering, where only a 4 yr degree is necessary for entry level positions.</p>
<p>Limit the debt to an amount that will be easy for you to pay off in the 10 years after you graduate. Here are two ways of looking at it:</p>
<p>1) Use an online calculator to figure out monthly payments on the debt. Limit your debt to an amount where you think the payments will be relatively easy to make, even on a modest entry-level salary. </p>
<p>For example, I don’t think $150 a month would be difficult for most youngsters to deal with – but $950 might be extremely difficult. Your comfort level might differ, but for undergraduate debt I would suggest $350/month as being the upper limit. </p>
<p>2) Take on no more total debt than the total amount of a modest & reasonable, typical first year salary for students graduating with the degree you contemplate. Not the salary you hope to get --the one that you are pretty much guaranteed to get as long as you are willing to work. $25K would be very reasonable by that standard – even when my son had dropped out of college, he earned that much with full time employment. (If you do the math you’ll see that the monthly payments on a subsidized loan will fall within the limits I suggested above by that calculation).</p>
<p>With parents income at 50K, I think that some highly selective schools have a no loan policy–that is, you could get full tuition as a grant.</p>
<p>I would limit student loans to $20,000 or less.</p>