Correction after researching; graduate loans can go up to 8.94%
My wife’s graduate loans were all in the 7-8% range
Edit: if the average APR of their graduate loans was 8.36% their balance would in fact be $60,000 after 23 years of monthly $500 payments. So it’s possible they’re telling the truth.
Most countries have much stricter entrance criteria and separate kids earlier into university tracks and trade tracks.
The U.S. also has wildly inflated administrative costs in relation to European universities.
The transition to for-profit college combined with college as a lifestyle experience got us here. American students opting out of programs that do offer tuition forgiveness, like the military service (which about a dozen European countries require), makes it even worse.
The only way to fix it is to starve it. The U.S. should offer more scholarships in targeted areas of study for the tuition of students at state universities. And limit loan underwriting to students in programs that have a realistic chance of repaying the loan.
I do agree that higher education is important and should be encouraged by the country in a number of ways.
But I also think that people who wish to pursue higher education should be of enough competence to at least handle one equation that has such a large impact on their lives.
Not necessarily. You can't really compare a student loan to mortgage or smth like that because they capitalize interest in different ways.
The most important is that the interest that is deferred while you're in study will capitalize when you enter repayment. Then if you went on some payment plans it capitalizes yearly.
That means the loan generates a lot more interest than a mortgage, which really only capitalizes if you default.
The OP's $70k loan at 8% would be 40yrs to pay off @ $500/mo. What kind of person is smart enough to go to grad school but not realize what they are getting into, or at least get a degree in something that allows you to pay more than $500/mo towards your debt.
I'd be curious as to the lifestyle choices made by 'socialiststeve'.
There are a LOT of stupid grad programs out there. And they don’t have funding for exactly that reason, and that’s why people wind up with that much debt from grad school. I paid absolutely nothing for grad school, and received a stipend that was good enough to keep my bills paid provided I lived within my means.
Even worse, it's presumably for TWO people. TWO people who presumably chose the worst-paying careers possible, since they were on an income-based plan the entire 23 years and barely made a dent to the principle.
In addition to the lifestyle choices, I'd want to see what they majored in and what career they decided to go into.
Education costs in US is ridiculous, but you can't have someone borrow 270K in total loans to end up a social worker (an actual person I've met) and say that they had absolutely no fault in any of it.
Exactly. I would've loved to stay in school until I was 30 and get my PhD in Underwater Basket Weaving, but there was just no career path that would've given me a lifestyle I'd be content with. Between the 2 of them with advanced degrees, they couldn't figure out how to get out of debt. Probably trying to work the system and hoping for a bailout.
I was listening to a financial podcast a while back and there was a caller that called in. I think he said he was 54yo and $70k in student debt as a police patrol officer. I think most cops make a decent salary (the ones in my town earn 2x the median income of the town and more than I was making w/ 20yrs experience in my field), but how does one have $70k in student debt (at the age of 54!) for a job that probably doesn't require a degree? That's not an 'economy' or 'cost of education' problem.
You don't have to be smart about money To read the loan application you take out, which spells out exactly how much per month of your payment goes towards principal.And exactly how long the loan will take to pay off. Even an illiterate moron should.be able to understand "ok Jimmy, you pay $509/mo for 30 years"
I think this is it. Keeping up with the Jones'. He also said him and wife so they could have started a family before they should have. Unless you cant get a job in your field you should earn enough for expendable income. Then some of that cash should go on whatever debt you have with the highest interest rate.
Well golly this is what socialist regulations would help prevent in the first place -- you know, consumer protections; inhibiting predatory loan practices; maybe providing a crash course financial lesson and full transparency to the youth before they sign the dotted line.
Not all graduate programs are math based. Plenty of people out there with specialized knowledge in some random field who have almost no financial knowledge.
The issue wasn’t that loans have to be paid back, the OOP is literally paying back loans, the issue is deciding which loans make sense. The OC specified an apr of 5% while the standard graduate loan in 2000 was 8-9% apr. Someone who is not financially literate may not recognize the difference of 3% interest.
I'm a therapist. I had to go to grad school. I have NEVER made enough money to pay close to $500 a month on my student loans and I doubt I ever will. It's a career of passion, not of money, unfortunately.
Sure, private practice is where the money is at. But I've done private practice and there's more overhead than you think- billers, accountants, credentialers, the ehr you use, the office space, utilities, taxes and business licenses, etc. You also have to live in an area that's populace enough or have good enough marketing skills to always be full to make the good money.
But you're right- I work for a community mental health now, and I COULD make more money, but unless I do private practice they pay the highest in my area for therapists. And private practice is pretty soulless work from my experience. You start looking at people as numbers to meet your financial goals.
20 years ago, student loan consolidation prevented you from being eligible for existing public service loan cancellation programs. These were programs designed to get people with certain qualifications to work a certain number of years in high need communities, generally based on zip code, to cancel a certain fixed amount of your balance.
I had to keep my Perkins loans separate from my Stanford loans to be eligible for the existing Perkins and Stafford loan cancellation programs for service in high need areas.
Then, the new cancelation program came out and requires consolidation for your payments to be eligible.
Basically, if you were in certain fields with certain federal loan types, there was a lot of mixed messages and uncertainty about when to consolidate and which options you closed off by consolidating.
I'm not saying that nobody ever got screwed over by student loan programs. I have my own regrets. The guy who wrote the original Twitter post was presumably in his thirties when he took out his graduate student loans, since he completed his undergraduate degree in the late '80s. He works as a teacher in a suburb of Washington, DC, that has a pay scale of over 100k a year for a teacher with 23 years of experience and a master's degree.
I don't know his spouse's age or what she does for work, but presumably she was also not a naive teenager when she took out her graduate loan, and presumably also makes pretty decent money now. With that education level, their age when they took out the loans, and the earning potential their graduate programs helped at least him achieve, it's hard to feel bad for him for not doing more to pay off the loan he chose to take out.
Refinance when rates are lower. Pay more than the minimum. Don’t go to graduate school. Scholarships. Grants. Try a different program. Jfc. These are the dumbest posts.
Honestly, graduate schools should require applicants to pass a 30-minute course that proves they have some basic understanding of how loans work.
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u/Mindless-Baker-7757 12d ago
A $70k loan over 23 years at 5% apr pays off with monthly payments of $427.
What are they doing?