I got accepted into UCLA to get an M.A. in Urban Planning and today I got my financial aid award letter and I’m “lucky” enough for $20,000 a year in loans. I’m kind of stressed out about getting into so much debt… so Dopers, please tell me your stories about how you took out tons of loans for grad school and how grad school (and the job you got after grad school) was well worth it. Thanks!
Bizarre. They paid me to go to grad school.
I can only talk about my own grad school experience which was in, frankly, a field you go into for love, not money (anthropology). The people I know who subsidized grad school with loans lived poor as grad students and are living poor in the real world because of loan repayments. For instance, a friend of mine is a full professor living in a ratty apartment because she’s making what’s effectively a mortgage payment every month to repay her loan. But she doesn’t regret her choice because she’s doing what she loves. But YMM definitely V.
I was lucky enough to get a fee waiver and a large enough stipend to get by. (And now I’m in the software industry. Go figure).
Um… the title said “please help me feel better” not “please make me feel like a dumbass for not getting any fellowships/stipends”
I’m trying to be realistic here. I do love Urban Planning and I’m excited about going to grad school and being educated enough to pursue the career I want to pursue, but I also don’t want to be eating Ramen noodles for the rest of my life.
crickets
Well, I ended up borrowing about $75,000 for grad school, living like a pauper during that time. But now I get by just fine. I will be paying my student loans for a long time (I have such a good interest rate, that honeslty I am not interested in paying them faster). The payment plans are always so flexible that it really should not be a burden once you enter “the real world” (of course this is contingent on what kind of “real world” job you can get).
My honest opinion is that you should not worry, flexible repayment plans, low interest rates, make this investment in yourself usually worth the return.
It’s OK. Grad students almost always get stipends or fellowships in some fields, and almost never do in others. It doesn’t mean you’re a dumbass if you didn’t get a stipend.
I took out about $100,000 to go to grad school (okay, it was a professional school), and now I have a great job, make buckets of dough, and am utterly fulfilled.* Okay, in reality, I’ve paid off about three-quarters of the debt, and like Gangster Octopus said, given the good interest rate that I have, I’m not too worried about getting the rest paid off.
However, going into law school, I knew what salaries would be like coming out, and what my odds were of getting a job. I believed that I had about a 90% chance of graduating and taking a job that paid at least $80,000 a year, so given those odds, taking on $100,000 in debt seemed reasonable. You should consider something like that before taking on a significant debt.
On the other hand, if it’s a one year masters program, and you’ll only be $20K in debt, and can pay that out over 25 years…
Go for it!
*YMMV, and some days so does mine. 
Well, we can be about 100% sure that it wasn’t for the PhD. program in Not Being a Jackass.
And related to that, it was my understanding that Ph.D. programs usually offer stipends, while M.A. programs do not. Since the OP indicated an M.A. program, I assumed this was the reason for needing to take loans.
Thanks for all the encouraging stories! I mean, ultimately I’m going to take out the loans no matter what cause this is what I want to do, but it makes me feel better to know that there have been others who were stressed out too.
2 year program, so like 50K in debt? I figure the absolute lowest I’d be making once I’m done w/ school would be around 50K anyways so I guess it will work out ?
Try this loan calculator; you can see how much your payments will likely be. The only uncertainty is the interest rate, but you can play around a bit anyway.
Fellow MA-to-be student here. I wasn’t even offered the loan option, on account of being an international student (UChicago is not very international student friendly when it comes to financial aid). I’ll probably have to take it out seperately. Looking over the payment plans, however, it seems pretty feasible, even considering that my field (English literature) is not exactly a lucrative one. And I’ve been told it’s easier to get a stipend as a TA if you continue on to a PhD program. At any rate, I’m sure neither one of us will starve. 
And congratulations on your acceptance!
It looks like I’ll have about a $80-90,000 loan debt by the time I get out of law school. I don’t know if it will be worth it yet; I’m still in my first year and I have no idea where I want to practice or even what sort of law I want to practice.
If you have any doubts about the sensibility of the loans, stop thinking practically and tell yourself that you’re doing it for the love of education. Any education. Urban planning, law, tuba, history. It’s all good.
Damn. Forget to relate my girlfriend’s story.
She was accepted as an MFA poetry student. No stipend, no grants, nothing. It would all be loans. If she would have accepted, she would have ended up with more debt than me, the future ridiculously wealthy lawyer.
Instead, she’s going for a second BA in biology. More lucrative than couplets.
Two MS degrees (Applied Mathematics, Biostatistics): The MS AM involved TA work, the MS Bios was a straight pre-doc fellowship. The $$$ depends on institutional funding. Certain fields simply don’t have the funding base for stipends.
Generally, the programs that have funding bases for stipends and fellowships do so at the Master and Doctoral and Post-Doctoral levels…the money at each level depends on the degree level, as well as the prestige of the funding program.
Most financial gurus say there’s good debt and bad debt. Good debt is debt you take on as an investment, meaning college and home loans. Bad debt is everything else. So you shouldn’t feel bad about going into debt for a degree. (I graduated $60,000 in debt, BTW, and I look on it as the best money I’ve ever spent). Though I’m not quite a financial guru, IME PhD’s are not worth the time and effort, but Masters’ degrees hit that sweet spot in terms of time spent versus future earnings growth.
No financial aid is one of the reasons I didn’t go to grad school at UCLA. I guess you have to do a cost-benefit analysis. Any chance of them coughing up a better financial aid offer in your second year there?
Getting a Master’s degree is definitely the sweet spot in terms of earnings vs time invested. So as long as the job market in your field is reasonably strong, go for it.
What always made me feel better was my belief that if I had to run away I was pretty sure I could find some third world toilet where that bitch Sallie Mae wouldn’t bother to chase me down. For awhile it was touch and go, the eternal struggle between becoming an attorney or a West African mercenary. I eventually chose to skip malaria and lose the moral highground on that one, but there are days I still toy with the notion.
So just whisper that to yourself at night.
“I can always find some place where I can sell cheap guns and she won’t be bothered to come after me.”
All kidding aside, you’ll feel better if you are reasonably certain of being able to pay off your loans with the career that follows. My decision was an investment that I don’t regret, but that was because I could calculate the length of my forthcoming debt slavery to within a year or so. If I had been looking at a 20+ year payoff period, I’d have felt much differently.
I don’t agree with that at all; I think you need to look seriously at what you can expect to make with the degree you’re going into debt for. I’ve got friends who went into serious debt majoring in things they loved like oboe and now they work at bookstores and don’t see how they’ll ever get out from under. They really regret how easy it was to get into such deep debt.
It’d also be worth your while to see how much it’d cost to go to another school that may not be as prestigious. The school you go to only really ever makes a difference for that very first job you get (if at all). After that, your working reputation matters a lot more than your diploma.