Excellent NY Times article

[itshim]

Originally Posted by StinaTado

Well, the very top schools (Ivies, top 10 LAS, Stanford, etc), almost all promise to meet 100% of the student's demonstrated need and they are pretty broad in what a student needs. In general, if a student's parents make $60K or less, it's free at these schools and the bulk of the aid from these schools are grants and scholarships, not loans. The only hitch is that it's very hard to get into these schools. Now the next (very small) step down are schools like NYU and USC and they don't offer nearly as much merit aid because they are usually the back-up for kids who don't get into the top school. They have a handful of wonderful merit scholarships to steal the top students who lose out in the admissions roulette at the level above, but for the students who are still good, but slightly less qualified (one B freshman year or whatever), there's not much help to be had.

Now, NYU has a reputation for not giving out aid- I am about the same age as the woman in the article and I grew up on the other side of the country and I still knew that, so I didn't apply. She must have known the financial situation going in- after all, they do give it to you with your acceptance packet. In her case, she was probably smart enough to get into a great public school but was too snobby to do so. She had options to graduate with less debt, but she let her vanity get in the way. With that sort of attitude, it's no wonder she's drowning in debt. She's insisting on living in trendy places and taking a low paid job. She could have gotten a drone job at a business for a few years (my BF's company hires NYU grads with all sorts of majors all the time), made a decent salary and live cheaply while paying down her loan. Instead, she chose to go an artsy route. She's still making bad decisions based on her image. There's just no helping some people.

Oddly enough this type of publicity may actually work out in her favor. Probably some silent donator will anonymously foot the bill and all her problems will vanish.

I remember roughly 5 years ago about the story of the NYU student who couldn't afford the housing ended up having to live in the library. There was a whole lot of ruckus about the costs and then all of a sudden, he had lodging free of charge for the remainder of his college years there. NYU did a wonderful job of simply avoiding the bigger picture, and the issue remained mumm for further addressing.

[ambient]

Originally Posted by Alphalogica

Excellent article dealing with the issue of massive student loan debt.

Your Money - Another Debt Crisis Is Brewing, This One in Student Loans - NYTimes.com

(Why I'm glad I go to a much cheaper state university in East Texas between Dallas and Houston AND have VA benefits.)

Ok, here's what I seriously have to question about that young woman in that whole situation:

You signed up for $100K of debt to go to NYU and study "religious and women's studies"? REALLY???

Hmm. Let's see, people. Follow me closely here:

1. "Debt" => "you have to pay it back WITH INTEREST".
2. "You have to pay it back with interest" => "it really helps to have money."
3. "Really helps to have money" => "need to get a job that provides you with enough income."
4. Larger debt => more money to pay back => need a bigger income to support the debt.

Gee, I wonder what the job demand and average starting salary for people in the "religious and women's studies" field looks like... Anyone? Anyone?...

The aforementioned reasoning was about the maximum effort required by anyone with an IQ over 75 to understand that taking on a ridiculous debt to study something thoroughly impractical and financially useless is NOT a good idea. And I managed to do that in about two minutes with just a cheap state school degree.

A smart person at an elite school couldn't figure this one out in, what, four years?

Looking for blame...sorry honey, but you gotta start by taking a good look in the mirror.

[TuborgP]

Originally Posted by John23

Articles like this are *waaaaaaayy* too easy on the k-12 system. They leave k-12 out of the equation completely and think that it's just a bank problem or lending problem. But it's a problem of blind faith being created in highschools. At an almost unlimited rate. Highschools now are in the blindfaith business and unverisities and banks pick up the proceeds.

-Blind faith that you'll have success and life on easy street if only you get into this college thing.

-Blind faith that you'll be successful if you do well in school and do what your teachers tell you to do.

The problem is that students are not brought down to earth before they get 1 loan, let alone 2 or 3.

Too much artificial, marked up junk is put in their face before they can make logical and rational decisions about their future. SAT, letters of recommendation, college application deadlines, etc.

Before all of that, students should be looking at the correlations between the average salary with a certain degree and debt. Before any college testing or prep starts, students should be looking at these numbers.

-Symptomatic of the media now, they like making casual/superficial links between things (mortgage crisis vs student debt crisis) but they miss the more important underlying real story. The real story is they didn't get the right information in k-12, too many assumptions about unlimited future "success" by going to college. They're doing a terrible job of sharing the truth in k-12. The faith to earn a degree in womens studies came from somewhere, but the media doesn't like to like at the origins of that.

Much easier to say it's a student debt problem than an origin of education problem. Why are so many flakey degrees being created now days? Why are flakey degrees being created in a rocky and unpredictable economy?

Who decided to send students to earn featherweight degrees in a 2008/2010 "jobless" economy? When you look at the origins of this, being politically correct and "happy" (learning about women and religious studies) seems to take precedence over making harder, more logical future economic decisions. And it comes at the expense of everyone if you can't pay back your student loans. In some ways, everyone is being saddled with politically correct happiness.

-Univesities and banks don't force anyone to take loans that they can't pay back. But students are scooted into them. It doesn't abstain responsbility from those that did scoot students into them.

-More kid glove treatment by the Times. "Then there’s a branding problem. Urging students to attend a cheaper college or leave altogether suggests a lack of confidence about the earning potential of alumni."

If you're offering degrees in religious and womens studies, what "branding" problem do you have? You'll have a branding problem, because the quality of your product (and future earning potential) doesn't match the "brand" you advertise as a prestigious school.

Your words are so very accurate and on target. Just think of all the students some who were very bright and intelligent with strong academic skills who loved art and were told to major in graphic design because he ASVAB or another test along with a misguided guidance counselor told them to. Graphics Arts degree debt and a perpetual over supplied market.