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I am not the outlier - its becoming the average..I'm talking about graduate loans, college loan debt continues to rise and I would wager its rising to over $ 30K.
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According to CreditKarma.com, a consumer credit advocate, which released its U.S. Credit Score Climate Report with trend data for April 2011, student loan debt increased over last year. In fact, nationally, average student loan debt per consumer increased six percent since April 2010 to $29,572."
If the average is $29,572, your $70k is an outlier. I'd bet 2 standard deviations from the mean. My $120k is even further out.
If you've got a JD and we compare that to PhDs, you're only 10k from the mean, most likely within 1 standard deviation and not an outlier. But that's not what is being talked about.
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The average student graduates with $27,000 in student loan debt-basically a car payment. Big deal. Most people will be able to pay off that debt in under 5 years and will earn multiple times MORE than that in their lifetime vs not having that degree.
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Thats really wishful thinking. I graduated with $75k in loans from law school 11 years ago and im still paying them off. I have friends who came out with 100-200k in loans, from other graduate programs. Most if the jobs arent paying that high either, I have seen unemployed grad students working at Starbucks.
The initial line was average student. And the initial line of though was absolutely correct. Your anecdote has nothing to do with the average student, but a small subset - students who graduated from law school a decade ago. You take this anecdote and applied it to everyone and I called you on it.
Thats really wishful thinking. I graduated with $75k in loans from law school 11 years ago and im still paying them off. I have friends who came out with 100-200k in loans, from other graduate programs. Most if the jobs arent paying that high either, I have seen unemployed grad students working at Starbucks.
Well....this is the crux of the matter-I would never advise anyone to take out student loans of double or more of their expected starting salary. Also, the legal field is so over full of attorneys that it just isn't a good job market and why would anyone chose to go into that field now??? Now, if you were going to be a doctor and your starting salary was going to be in the $300K range, sure, $100K in student loans is a walk in the park.
The federal student loan MAX for undergrads is $27K. If you have to take out private loans beyond that, perhaps you should rethink your choice of schools.
To be accurate, they are taking the money away from unsubsidized loans and moving it into the Pell grant program. In other words, they are recognizing that unsubsidized loans mostly go to poorer students who've already tapped into other aid programs and still need assistance. It is counterproductive to saddle these people with massive debt. A better use of taxpayer funds is to award these students grants.
And for further accuracy, this change applies to not just graduate programs but also to 'professional degrees' such as architecture. Architecture is already a field in which minorities and lower income classes are massively underrepresented. These fields need a financial aid structure that invites students from all economical and social backgrounds. All of society benefits from industries that have balanced social, cultural, and economic demographics.
OP is not the only one who is telling only part of the story. It's just fearmongering really.
As for the responses, to argue that only people who can afford college should go is really unAmerican. This is not a caste society where we are all forced into the same life that our parents led and theirs before that. All of us have benefited from the freedom to seek our own fortunes, and our parents did too, and their parents did.
If anything, we should be going further in our reform of the financial aid system and simply doing away with the system whereby it is the parents' income that determines what a student is eligible for, and simply allow a student to apply based on their own circumstances. Most Western countries did this long ago.
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