Hey Stu, I have a great deal on expanded water front property. It's on the coast...call me!

Some of those are astounding - others, like the Bachelor's in MIS isn't bad.

Maybe we should start a school

_________________

Not terrible, but my BS in MIS is going to cost less than half that when I'm done.

I think they still do that. Whenever I get my loan for the semester, it shows me how much I've been awarded and I can either choose to accept that full amount or choose to take out less.

_________________
"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hockey Night in Buffalo

Mine cost ~ 45...and I went to a for-profit school. My Masters is going to cost ~20.

_________________

In the 2008-2009 school year the total amount borrowed by students was $75.1 billion. This year the total student debt is expected to reach $1 trillion.

In the 1980s and 1990s the federal government (i.e. We The People) bailed out 747 failed savings & loan associations, to the tune of $87.9 billion. In 2008, we collectively set aside $700 billion to bail out failing Wall Street banks and other financial institutions.

If we have money to pay for the failed business decisions of banks and corporations (who apparently believe that capitalism means they make all the profits and the American taxpayer pays for all the losses), then we certainly have money to bail out students who have been victimized by predatory lending institutions working hand-in-hand with greedy universities.

If indebted students could unite and refuse to pay their loans until the government and universities address the obscene rise in tuition prices they would truly be "too big to fail."

_________________
th' only knower of th' cosmic mysteries alive at this time

I was reading an article that one of the reasons some people speculate that youth today aren't as willing to protest like generations once before is because we depend on the government for student loans. Almost all of my loans, save for like $2500 (out of maybe 60k in loans?), is from government loans. It was an interesting theory.

Here's the article with additional reasons:

http://www.alternet.org/vision/151850/8 ... age=entire

When I went to college Pell Grants (the federal government's largest grant program) covered nearly 80% of college tuition. Today it covers about a third.

When did we decide, as a country, that it isn't a good economic decision to invest in educating and training the next generation of workers and taxpayers? We literally threw away $60 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan - I'm not talking about what we spent on the wars (over $1.2 trillion), but rather the amount the U.S. simply can't account for due to waste and fraud.

How many students could we have sent to colleges and technical schools with that money?

The decisions we make as a nation, and are willing to passively accept as citizens, are just astounding. I fear history will judge us most unkindly.

_________________
th' only knower of th' cosmic mysteries alive at this time

I can invest in my own college education, thank you.

Ham

_________________
Do you believe yet?

There's also a huge problem with students taking out loans for a major they'll never make the money back on. These students complain that student loans are a huge problem; well, don't major in something useless!

I'm going to have $60-70k when I graduate. I came to this school with $9000/year in scholarships and expecting my parents to give another $6000-7000 since that is what it cost to send me to my private high school, and they told me that they would be able to afford continuing to pay that money to my education every year because they already had for the past four, and my brothers are spaced out enough that they would never have to deal with more than kid in high school at a time until the last two, when presumably the oldest and I will both be graduated from college.

Instead, my parents decided to move at the beginning of my junior year and never bothered to pay the money promised to me my first two years as it was (of course by then it was too late for me to go to another school), saddling me with quite a bit more debt than I intended; but by then, it's too late to transfer because colleges won't typically accept any transfer students beyond the start of their junior years, and all my friends are here.

Then my college wouldn't give me off-campus status, forcing me to take on another $8000 this year that I had not been expecting to have since the beginning of last year when the higher-ups on campus essentially lied to us students about what the policies this year would be... Yeah, I was and am extremely angry about that, as someone who is paying out the ass to come here. Most of the students here have parents that are happy to pay at least 50% of the cost of tuition (about $29,000/year), but mine definitely can't afford to do that and reneged on what they had promised to pay anyway.

So, I was expecting to have about $40k in loans upon graduation but am instead in this position, with a psychology major so I'm not going to grad school right off the bat because I can't afford it. Even with a master's degree, the extra pay I'd be making wouldn't be worth it to have to pay off all this debt that's been racked up plus at least another $30k or so, not all at once. Average starting salary with a bachelor's in psychology is about $18,000. I expect to be stuck in this town (the mental hospital here hires students from my college with BS's in psych every year) for another 5-6 years (I can get by here if I split rent with one person paying only $200 a month rent) at the very least before I'm freed up to go to grad school. I can live on about $8,000/year here comfortably, including saving up some money, while I pay off my loans.

I really freaking did not want to be stuck here after graduation, but it's looking more and more like that's what I'll be doing. I eventually want to get a doctorate, to be honest, and work at a juvenile inpatient facility, and I know that I will have great experience for that after working at the institution here, but I did nooooot ever want to be stuck in northern Indiana.

_________________
Miles to go before I sleep

‎"Love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation."
-Khalil Gibran

A tough road to walk, ATL. I have to tell you, though, from experience, 1) if you don't do graduate school right after your B.A., it is really a challenge to start it up again after career, home, family start to take up your life, and 2) it is real easy to get stuck in a place you never expected to be. I moved to Florida from WNY 33 years ago and always thought it was a temporary thing.

_________________
th' only knower of th' cosmic mysteries alive at this time

I know it will be difficult to start up again, and I may not; I do absolutely love taking classes, though, and if I can swing it at all, I'll be taking a class here and there because A) I love it, B) it will keep me somewhat up to date (especially taking classes that involve diagnosis after the DSM-V comes out in two years), and C) I'll have recent grades to offer graduate schools as proof that I am not incompetent.

And yeah, I'll most likely be "stuck" in the Midwest for the rest of my life, or something like that. It's fine. I know for a fact that most, if not all, of the friends that I have made in college will end up settling within a few hours' radius of here, and it's extremely cheap to live here. I love to travel more than anything else, so to me, it doesn't matter all that much where my base home ends up being. I can't pretend to know where I will be in five years, either.

_________________
Miles to go before I sleep

‎"Love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation."
-Khalil Gibran

You've named the top two things on my list that I would do with lottery winnings. If I could spend the rest of my life taking whatever classes interested me and traveling I think I would be the happiest person in the world.

I was fortunate to travel to Germany this summer for a two week educational tour, followed by ten days in Italy, vacationing with my wife.

Fantastic.

I came away a huge fan of Germany and their people and the ancient history of Italy that is literally under foot and at your fingertips (we were in Rome, Pompeii, Capri, and Florence) just blew me away.

Sounds like you have a wonderful life in front of you, ATL.

_________________
th' only knower of th' cosmic mysteries alive at this time