While majoring in Computer Science at MU, not a fancy school by any means, i had a job in my field on the third year of school and by the time i graduated i had a few years of development experience. Most folks I communicated with in school had similar experience. Those who didn't were typically foreign students. Do other majors not work this way? It baffles me how someone went through their college career, at a prestigious school at that, and couldn't get some kind of job/internship.
Our sons' student debt is delaying our retirement
31–40 of 108 posts
Re: Our sons' student debt is delaying our retirement
#32If you co-sign a loan it's not your son's debt, it's your debt.
Re: Our sons' student debt is delaying our retirement
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given that you can't get out of student loan debt through bankruptcy, they're at basically no risk. It might take them your entire lifetime to collect, but they'll get it eventually unless you happen to kill yourself at a young age.
Time value of money: they don't just have to collect the original amount, but the interest they would have gotten from putting the money somewhere else. So even a lifetime may not be enough time if the borrower cannot keep up with interest.
Except the money they loan is generally created on the spot. Not sure they could simply invest it elsewhere.
Re: Our sons' student debt is delaying our retirement
#34a bachelor's degree in journalism and media studies. He's especially interested in a Hollywood career, but has found it hard to land a job there. These folks went into debt to the tune of nearly 4x the average american pre-tax income, for a theater degree. No, the lenders shouldn't have let them do that... but come on.
Agreed.
I went to an affordable, in-state university. My father was wise enough to advise me that I was taking on debt for myself, and should think very hard about the economic consequences of my decision.
Some parents are just way too nice to their kids, and these two are in that bracket.
I've found it very amusing as I've grown up to notice this is a pattern in otherwise well-meaning, financially successful baby-boomer parents: in stark contrast with my father and other parents like him, they seem to encourage their children to pursue their dreams without any regard to reality. I suspect my father's financial struggles gave him a sense of practicality that some of the executives I work with never had in advising their own kids.
I have 3 executives I've reported to in the past year. One of them subsidizes her 30 year old daughter's life of studying Middle Eastern cultures. Another subsidizes his son's death metal band (which he abandoned his Music degree midway for), and the third is paying for his daughter's failing business, openly complaining about the fact that she doesn't seem to show up for work very often and has hired people despite lacking revenue to even pay for herself.
Parents enabling bad decisions is never a good thing.
Re: Our sons' student debt is delaying our retirement
#35$130k on a journalism degree which is rapidly becoming a professional blogger?
This is a first-world, lack of common-sense problem.
Re: Our sons' student debt is delaying our retirement
#36The real solution to this is to open up some kind of bond market for majors. Bundle up a bunch of student loans by major and create a partly public partly private debt obligations.
Schools have far too much incentive to lie about the value of different degrees. Parents and high school advisors don't have the necessary information.
A market device would give students the feedback they need to plan their futures.
Plus if large employers ever complain about the skills that grads are lacking, they can be asked to invest in the appropriate student loan category.
Re: Our sons' student debt is delaying our retirement
#37Never cosign a loan. There is one reason that lenders required a co-signer -- they know that the borrower is high risk for defaulting. If you can't afford or didn't save for college, go to a cheaper school. In-state tuition and fees at most state universities is more than it used to be but still generally under $10K a year. There is no reason to go into six-digit debt for an undergraduate degee. With very few excepti…
Given that you can't get out of student loan debt through bankruptcy, they're at basically no risk. It might take them your entire lifetime to collect, but they'll get it eventually unless you happen to kill yourself at a young age.
And we should expect the suicide rate of young people to rise accordingly.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/c-cryn-johannsen/student-loan-...
Re: Our sons' student debt is delaying our retirement
#38I was a writer for Wired Magazine for three years and never took a single class in journalism, and nothing beyond the required english classes in college. I think we need to do more to help educate parents and prospective students that in most cases a college degree is next to worthless. For-profit schools like the University of Phoenix get a lot of negative press, but how about these little known colleges referenced…
> Most psych/business majors would be better served working their way up through the ranks.
A little anecdotal story backing this up...
My wife started as a paraeducator (teacher's helper) at a school after graduating from high school. A few years later she started working at another school, helping homeless & migrant children. She eventually left that job to work with migrant/bilingual daycares. This process took 8 years.
She then pursued a degree in psychology. Why? Because her next advancement required the state to check a little box on her form that says: "Applicant has a B.S. in social studies or similar". Where did she go for the degree? The cheapest, online college she could find.
The degree didn't matter for 8 years. The place the degree came from didn't matter at all. The price of the degree mattered only to us. She would have gained nothing by pursuing the degree immediately, and racking up any sizable debt from this degree would've just been silly.
Re: Our sons' student debt is delaying our retirement
#39A Bachelor's degree doesn't really do that much for you these days. It's become like a high school diploma was 30 years ago (which almost no one paid for). I keep trying to advocate that people not go so far in debt for a college degree. For med school or law school (although I would argue that this is not a great investment with the current glut of law school grads) it makes sense to go into debt of that size. But I…
Few friends went to a state school in NJ and lived at home - literally could not get cheaper than this situation for us - and they ended up with between 20 and 40 thousand of student loans.
Yes, they did work part time. But 100-200 a week from a part time job doesn't go far. That's gas and lunch.
They certainly got some aid other than loans, but I do not know the level of scholarships they received. Might have been their problem!
Re: Our sons' student debt is delaying our retirement
#40I was a writer for Wired Magazine for three years and never took a single class in journalism, and nothing beyond the required english classes in college. I think we need to do more to help educate parents and prospective students that in most cases a college degree is next to worthless. For-profit schools like the University of Phoenix get a lot of negative press, but how about these little known colleges referenced…
>I think we need to do more to help educate parents and prospective students that in most cases a college degree is next to worthless. Do you have a source for this? The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the exact opposite. [0] >Most psych/business majors would be better served working their way up through the ranks. Source? Again and again, people only seem to look at the cost of education like education is a product…
> Source? Again and again, people only seem to look at the cost of education like education is a product that you buy at a store that could be gotten cheaper. College education is an experience, an exposure to new ideas, a gradual development of ancillary skills.
--
Few people are saying college has no value. Mostly people say what you get is not worth what you pay. My own anecdote - I am by all accounts a successful "business degree" person. While I went to my four year college with a business major, I also started my career in business/marketing, starting at $10 an hour in freshman year, and getting to the 99th percentile of income for my age by age 24. The growth I received from college was a rounding error compared to the growth I got from work experience in the same 4 year period and same amount of effort. And I was paid to get the work experience...