Same here, except I took about ten years on my repayment schedule, and my total debt (this was over 30 years ago) was under $10K instead of the $32K or so that the average graduate today has to deal with.
The average college student loan debt per borrower is, as I said, something like $32K, and the median debt amount is $17K. Not six figures. (That’s because students whose families are non-wealthy enough to require loans are usually getting other forms of financial aid as well, rather than paying full sticker price for tuition, room and board.)
There are indeed far too many former students struggling under that kind of crippling debt, but most graduates are dealing with a far more modest amount.
Personally, I never felt in the least ill-used about being expected to commit to paying some (about 10%, in my case) of the cost of my own college education. If parents can afford to pick up the whole tab and choose to do so, that’s great.
But I wouldn’t criticize even a wealthy parent who required their kid to take on a small amount of their own college costs in the form of student loan debt. Adults, even young adults, even ones from wealthy families, shouldn’t automatically expect to get their way paid for them 24/7/365 the way they did when they were little.
Just to throw some figures into the thread, the current average cost for a four year education at a public college is around $100,000. The equivalent cost at a private college is around $210,000. cite
These are substantial sums and many families would have difficulties paying them out of hand, especially if they have more than one child going to college. So many students end up taking out loans to pay their tuitions.
I’m not trying to downplay the very real burden of having tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt as a young graduate. But it’s nowhere near as bad a burden as the hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt that only a relatively small percentage of students incur.
I think there may be a bit of an apples and oranges comparison going on in that article. It notes that financial aid is rising at the same rate as tuitions. That may well be true. But that represents a real increase in what students and their parents are paying.
Let’s say, for example, that the average cost of a four year education was $60,000 in 2001-2005 and is $100,000 in 2021-2025. And let’s say that financial aid during that same period rose from an average of $30,000 to $50,000. This means the percentages covered by financial aid held steady. But the amount the student owed after financial aid rose from $30,000 to $50,000.
The only way that financial aid would negate the effect of rising tuitions was if it was rising at a faster percentage than tuitions were so the increasing amount of aid cancelled out the increase in tuitions. To use the figures I gave, financial aid would have had to have risen from $30,000 in 2001-2005 to $170,000 in 2021-2025 in order to have held the amount students were paying steady over that period.
Whoa, I never said that financial aid negated or fully offset the effect of rising skyrocketing tuitions. I completely agree with you that the real costs of college have gone up drastically since I was in school, and that increases in financial aid haven’t been enough to cover the rise in debt.
I was only trying to make the point that most families are not in fact paying the full list price “out of hand”, or even having to cover the full list price with a combination of payment and debt, as it seemed to me your post #82 was implying. Yes, students have to take on too much debt and the charges are generally too high, but in practice the actual sums owed are usually not as massive as the full list price would lead one to think.
If you don’t save for your retirement then you become more of a burden on your children than if they had student loans. At least with a loan they are paying for their own life, their own future. If you keep yourself in poverty to pay for their schooling and then they have to waste the prime years of their life looking after their parents, they won’t thank you for it. They will wonder why the hell you didn’t save for your retirement and encourage them to make use of the low interest student loans that were available for them when they went to college.
My view is that we certainly are under no moral obligation to pay for our children’s higher education. No more than we are under any obligation to buy them a house or a car or clothes or food or anything else they might need as adults. I will do my best to help them if and when they need it, but I’m not about to hand them everything they need on a platter.
When I was student age, I would’ve loved to have been able to get a student loan to pursue my chosen vocation. As it was, my mother was generous enough to mortgage her house for me, and I paid it back, it was a loan not a gift. I was expected to invest in my own future. Parents already make a massive investment in their children’s future for the first 18 years or more of their life.
I know the OP was asking about the US, but perhaps the terms of a student loan are similar to the UK:
In the UK, students are not obliged to make any payments until they’ve graduated and their income is above £X. So, the answer to the question of “How are students expected to afford it?” is that they don’t pay anything until they can.
(Of course this is not to imply student debts are a cakewalk. Eg If you live in London, you might be technically earning enough to pay back the loan but actually be struggling to make ends meet).
I take his position to be that such a card is so poisoned a chalice that it gets offered to this or that student as a package deal: please take both this candy and this card.
Yup. The first week of college there are all these booths set up by credit card companies. They all are giving out gifts just for filling out an application for a card. I’m talking about the giant, party size bag of M&Ms. students are newly minted adults who can now sign contracts and end up getting high interest cards. An old op-Ed on the practice.
“ The report also described how companies lure cash-starved students with gifts of clothing and free food. In one flagrant case in Ohio, students who showed up for the food were required to fill out credit card applications before they could eat.”
Credit card companies truly understand the college demographic. You can tell by the marketing tactics they use to lure young adults into applying for new credit cards. These tactics mainly involve giving something away for “free.”
Expect to see credit card company representatives on or near campus giving out free stuff for credit card applications. Law prohibits them from giving away tangible items like t-shirts or frisbees on campus, but the law doesn’t forbid intangible items, like a coupon for a free sandwich at a local restaurant or a statement credit on your new credit card.
And credit card companies may even give away tangible items, just at a location that’s off-campus.3
Free things are nice, but this isn’t the way to sign up for a credit card. Shouldn’t you be suspicious of a company that bends the rules to try to give you a product? It isn’t just a free sandwich you’re getting when you sign up for a credit card. You’re signing up for a ticket to the Broadway musical Debt, starring you. Whether you attend or not, is up to you.
Do lenders consider what/where the student will be studying when making a decision about whether or not to provide a loan? A student pursuing a STEM degree from a modest in-state college has a better shot at paying back their loan that a one studying, say, medieval European history at an out-of-state big-name college.
Looking at my peer group, the extent to which parents pay for college is all over the place, based on resources and philosophy. When I was in college (with an onion in my belt etc), I was able to cover it with scholarships & with working full-time (my parents bought my books, which was a huge help). But today, as others have noted, you simply can’t do that.
Our deal with our kids was - attend community college for two years, and we’ll pay for state school (in Massachusetts, community college credits transfer & with a minimum grade get you automatic admission, plus it’s like $1500/semester), AND, if you really seem to have love for a specialty, we’ll support some of it.
So, between that & the fact that one of our kids is in Germany this semester for effectively no tuition, college has still been relatively cheap. But the point of all this is, there is an affordable-ish path to education, and that’s what we decided on as our minimal level of full support, and the rest is up to them.
My parents paid my undergrad tuition while I paid for books, living expenses, and what not, and I’m glad that they did. But had that not, I would have been able to pay it back within a few years - that was in the early to mid 90s.
Now? Psshh! Good luck with that. Tuition has risen, by some estimates, four times the rate of the average salary.
I graduated in from high school 1972. It had been made clear to me that if I wanted to go to college, I had to pay for it myself. I’m the oldest of 5, my mom was a stay-at-home, and since my one and only brother would be the one supporting a family (can you feel my eyes rolling here??) he was the one whose education would be covered. The only concession was that I could continue to live at home without paying room and board since everything I earned was being saved for college.
So, no, parents have not always been expected to pay, even when tuition was lots less than it is now. And for the record, I only lasted 2 semesters before I dropped out and enlisted in the Navy. Some years later, I used my GI Bill bennies to get my degree.
We were fortunate in that our daughter got a full scholarship to college, plus we’d enrolled her in the Florida Prepaid College Program. So we just had to help with her living expenses, since we had no intention of moving to Orlando so she could live with us. And because of that, she didn’t need any student loans, unlike many of her friends.
I had a coworker who graduated with an engineering degree and a 6-figure student debt. His parents absolutely couldn’t have afforded to pay for his college. But he continued to live at home at least 3 years after starting work, and for all I know, he’s still there, paying off his debts.
I would rather work through college and pay back student loans during my 20s and 30s instead of making my parents suffer from onerous financial debts while they should be enjoying their retirement.
Fortunately, even though my college was the more expensive compared to my older siblings I left college with a reasonable amount of student debt that I paid off in less than 5 years. My parents paid a significant amount because they could, but they didn’t take out any loans, I did. I also ended up in a well paying job right out of school so the debt was easy to pay down.
I started in 1984 and graduated in 1988. At the time, tuition, room, board and fees totalled about $15-17,000 annually. I received Guaranteed Student Loans and National Direct Student Loans (I think the names have changed since then) each year, graduating with about $20,000 in student loans. Coincidentally, it worked out that my loans were about one-third of the cost, my parents paid one-third of the cost out of pocket and I received about one-third in scholarships from the school. The repayment period was ten years, with payments, as I remember, of about $200-300 each month. At the time, the interest rates on these loans was below market rate, so I was in no hurry to pay them off early. But I had no problem doing so, even though I was somewhat underemployed and not earning as much as some others who graduated from the same school.
I think my parents took out a PLUS loan at some point there, but that may have been because the interest rate was favorable.
Can you elaborate on that? ISTM that future income potential and cost of the degree are kind of important considerations, both for the student and for anyone considering whether to provide a loan.
Maybe instead of medieval European history, I should have said music.
You know, you say that like it’s impossible- but mine were. That’s why I paid my tuition out of my own earnings- because my parents couldn’t afford the $1K tuition that was charged in 1981. They could afford to feed and house me and my three siblings but not that extra $1K.
There’s no one size fits all. Generally, the amount of student loan debt includes debt taken out by parents to fund their children’s education. It’s not like there has been some sort of culture shift. It’s always been some sort of mixed bag of who and how college was funded.
The amount of student debt has significantly increased over the last decade +. Not because, parents have all of a sudden decided that the burden of funding college is on the student, but because the Federal government began guaranteeing these loans, and as a result, access to such capital became much easier. Thus the number of people that are applying and attending college has increased. But the graduation rates haven’t necessarily increased, so the are more students/parents that will borrow money and the student ultimately drops out.