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Ballooning Student Loan Debt


Grace is Sufficient
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Indeed the first case mentioned in the article is extreme. Med school is expensive. No doubt about it. The other two cases mentioned in the article (initial loans of $50K and $28K) are perhaps more realistic undergraduate debt. What baffles me is that people don't seem to realize that student debt must be repaid. One cannot just walk away from it. Did these people really make a good faith effort to attempt repayment? I'm a pretty sympathetic person, but it is not clear to me that these borrowers tried to prevent the issue from snowballing.

 

I have been obviously thinking about college funding since my son is applying to schools. One of my friends was amazed by some calculation or other that had projected that she and her husband should have $52,000 saved for her son's undergraduate education. Most people seem aghast by the numbers and believe that colleges will not expect them to have socked away a certain percent of their income for post-secondary education. When the FAFSA reveals the EFC, the brutal reality hits.

 

Even State Us are not necessarily "inexpensive". UNC-CH grads recently carried an average of $15K in reported debt. I believe that this fact reveals the kind of debt orchestrated by the financial aid office. How many home equity lines of credit were tapped to pay for a student's education?

 

I think your cautionary tale probably needs to go on the K-8 board. Parents of preschoolers need to start saving for college if they have not already.

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We are very aware (wary?) of debt with regards to college and will be even more careful with my middle son who expects to go to grad school.

 

I think some of the best advice I've gotten from College Confidential is that one doesn't NEED an Ivy education to be successful for most fields - esp if one is planning on grad school. As suggested multiple times for potential pre-meds, we'll be looking at good schools below the very top where my son can get decent merit aid (and perhaps need based). Then we'll be saving for grad school.

 

If I hadn't read that, we'd still be thinking he needed top of the top to get to the top... and would probably be paying for it forever.

 

Just today in school I was talking with a student who hopes to go to Brown for a Psych major. All I could think of is how much debt he's likely to have when he graduates AND he'll need grad school to do anything with his degree. Granted, perhaps his parents have saved tons (but I doubt it) or maybe they make so little they'll get huge amounts of need based aid (maybe), but overall...

 

To each our own, but I feel for those who end up with tons of debt. What a way to start (or live) life.

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One of my friends was amazed by some calculation or other that had projected that she and her husband should have $52,000 saved for her son's undergraduate education. Most people seem aghast by the numbers and believe that colleges will not expect them to have socked away a certain percent of their income for post-secondary education. When the FAFSA reveals the EFC, the brutal reality hits.

 

.

 

Yep, they expect for people to do what my hubby's dad did. He started saving when he was a baby and managed to pay for college and med school out of that money. (Granted, med school was a lot cheaper than now.) We have done the same. It is AMAZING how much a little bit adds up!! It has been automatically deducted since he was a few months old. That contrasts to my experience. My parents didn't even think about it, but my dad had a great job. I went to Baylor and paid about half through scholarships and they just paid the rest. However, dad lost his job my sophomore year. If my grand-dad hadn't helped out with using the savings he was going to give me when he died, I'm not sure what I would have done!!! I would have been up a creek.

 

Christine

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Saving is wonderful.....

 

But I have talked to more than a few parents who saved the monthly amount the experts twenty years ago recommended if you wanted to send your child to an expensive private college ..........just to find out that $100,000 will barely cover half of their child's expensive private college expenses.

 

Saving is good. It definitely helps. But with the costs of college continuously increasing by twice the rate of inflation, I do think that parents are in a hard place.

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Yes, it will be interesting to see. Our little community college's enrollment has jumped by TONS. Many, many people are choosing to go their for 2 years and then transfer somewhere. Dh even mentioned that as an option, especially since Baylor's tuition has jumped so much. It was only 7,000 a year when I went and very comperable to the state schools. Now it is over 30,000 a year, so we haven't saved enough, though I'm hoping oldest will be a National Merit scholar and pay for a big chunk of it.

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We are very aware (wary?) of debt with regards to college and will be even more careful with my middle son who expects to go to grad school.

 

I think some of the best advice I've gotten from College Confidential is that one doesn't NEED an Ivy education to be successful for most fields - esp if one is planning on grad school. As suggested multiple times for potential pre-meds, we'll be looking at good schools below the very top where my son can get decent merit aid (and perhaps need based). Then we'll be saving for grad school.

:iagree:

 

DD17 is a National Merit Finalist and will be going to undergraduate school this fall where all tuition, fees and books are paid. If all goes as planned, we hope to be able to pay for medical school outright if/when that happens.

 

But...given her scholarship and the spacing of the first three children, we think we will not have any overlapping college expenses for the first 10 years of college (we are through 2 years so far). If we thought having four in diapers was difficult was difficult several years ago, I have a feeling we'll find that having three or four in college at the same time will be even more of a challenge. :eek:

 

FWIW, our approach to saving has been a little different than most. We chose to pay off our debts, including the mortgage, instead of saving. Now that is paid off, it is much easier to save *and* pay for college at the same time. I'm glad we did, since we lived in Maryland when the first three were born and now we live in VA. On top of that, the 529 plans in VA do not appear to give you much of an option beyond a couple of mutual funds, all of which took a 40% hit a year ago and I suspect will take another one soon. With our current approach, we are able to invest however we choose, and our investments recently have far outperformed the tax-benefited 529 funds that are available.

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