$555,000 student loan debt

Link

Considerations:

• According to the article over half of student loans aren't being repaid*
• Since she is a doctor could this be related to the health-care issues we have such civil discussions about on here
• Personal responsibility issue (in that she just kept putting repayment off)

I for one am unable to conjure any sympathy for her.

Thoughts?

*More than likely most of these folks couldn't get good jobs because they were too busy playing with their electronic media devices during class.

I still don't see how education is so expensive.  $555k (even after interest) is quite ridiculous and I don't think many could reasonably pay that off.

I'm looking at around $40k when I graduate with a BS in engineering.  Add grad school to that if I can't immediately find a job. 

^^^ Pretty much my thoughts.

On a related note, the state colleges here apparently mandate a financial management class for their students.  I've always thought this should be a mandatory high school class myself.

FROG MAN wrote: I have heard rumors that school in the states is much more expensive then in Canada, WGP i would be interested in hearing how much your paying for tution and books.

Tuition here is a bit over $13k a semester for up to 16-18 credits (depends on your GPA).  After scholarships, I'm paying about $5k.  Books are between $500-$700 a semester.

I was looking at 2 private schools, I ended up picking the cheaper one.

I have the top scholarship, I commute and have some general scholarship and it'll end up as $13,500 this and last semester in total. Books in total will be about $1000 or so depending on if I can find them online, but my college usually has "altered editions" specifically for them.

The other college would have been over $20k per year, which includes residence.

Edited by MeanMan - 17 February 2010 at 11:22pm

Beats one of the colleges I was looking at... 20 grand a SEMESTER. Yeah, no thanks. I'll continue on with the school I'm at now, thank you.

I am walking away with 0 dollars in loans and am currently getting paid $450 per month to go to school plus $1200/yr for books that usually cost about $400/yr.

Edited by Eville - 18 February 2010 at 1:37am

__sneaky__ wrote: Beats one of the colleges I was looking at... 20 grand a SEMESTER. Yeah, no thanks. I'll continue on with the school I'm at now, thank you.

*Raises hand*

BU is around there.

Luckily, wonderful Princeton University pays for a significant portion of my education.

I have about $30,000 in loans for school that I'll have to start paying soon since I'm done in May. I do have an internship now that will almost definitely turn into a full-time position once I graduate so I'm not too worried. Sucks that so much of my money has to go elsewhere but then again I wouldn't have my job without going to school (my boss really liked that I was going to NJIT) so I guess it's worth it in the end.

It definitely sucks to be the woman from the OP but she did it to herself really. Plenty of people go through med school and manage to keep the finances in line so I don't think you can blame this on the banks. Of course, they do go nuts with the interest and fees if you default but the idea is not to miss your payments anyway. Seems like bad planning and poor decision-making is what got her into that situation.

I agree with those of you who support the financial management classes in college. They love requiring all this extra crap to make us "well-rounded" but it's always stuff nobody cares about or that they won't use. Why not make it something like financial management, which most people are apparently terrible at? It'd probably be better to have something like that in high school though since you need those skills in college as well as after. I learned financial management the hard way: by being flat broke and unemployed for over a year. You really learn to stretch your money in those situations and even though it sucks, you need to know how to deal with it when it comes up so I value the lessons learned from that.