Question for Americans

That seems high to me. Definitely higher than average. I went to a very expensive private undergrad university and graduated with $38,000 in debt.

I'm now seven years out and I think I made my last payment about two years ago. Of course, I chose to live very cheaply and to make double payments. Otherwise it would've taken ten years or more to pay it off.

And, for grad school, my employer at the time (US Navy) paid for it.

That's high... probably for an elite college and/or a master's. The average debt for a 4-year degree is something in the neighborhood of $40k or less.

Still, even at $40k it's a burden, and the student ends up slowly paying it off over many, many years.

I honestly don't know how they manage.

I do know that some companies will allow you to work there for x amount of years and get your loans forgiven.

Also, one doesn't have to go to a school that will cost them $100,000.

I did my first 2 years at a community college (I received some financial aid and paid a few thousand out of pocket, under 5,000 I'm sure), then I finished up at a ]university. I got scholarships and grants to go there, which is money that you do not have to pay back.

Had that not been my case, I'd be screwed right now.

While *some* debt is typical, I don't believe THAT level is typical (for undergrad tuition).

She might have gone to a for-profit school; most of those have predatory recruitment / lending practices, and shutting them down should be a cornerstone of real education policy, as their students make up a very large percentage of those in trouble over student loan debts.

Graduate education in STEM is usually free in exchange for being a teaching or research ass't, and doctoral work in most other areas is similar.

Medical and law school debt could run that high, and my understanding is that there is no financial aid for law school. Business school is likely the same.

(Note that the master's degrees in business, law, divinity, social work, engineering, fine arts are essentially terminal vocational degrees; people going further will likely be professors or researchers. Also, universities provide a teaching certification which is sort of a master's degree and a money-maker; any support for that likely varies with the need for new teachers.)

Yes it is common. They spend spend half their lives repaying student loans.

No.

There is a wealth of actual data available on this, instead of speculation and disconnected data points.

I’m guessing someone’s been watching Happily Ever After. 🤔

One source


from https://www.statista.com/statistics/237924/tuition-costs-vs-student-loans-in-the-us/

So this shows average loan amounts relatively flat, regardless of the stated cost of attending an institution.

(Of course, some donors/alumni of major universities have stepped up and created huge funds to reduce undergrad costs--Yale stands out, and Stanford has made big strides.)

The interest rate on student loans is comparatively low, so for many, the payoff is intentionally stretched for dozens of years.

But 100K at just 5% still amounts to $5K a year in interest, every year.

Many don’t have medical insurance (or at least not very comprehensive insurance) and just spend their life in debt hoping for the best.

They don't do well. They're dying younger and working longer. That's because socialism is their enemy.

More and more, they don't.

Probably the biggest con going. I have no idea how they manage, either.

It's the 2nd reason we chose to not live there. The way my pregnancy went too, it would have cost us around 500k. She would be paying that off long after we're gone.

With great difficulty. There's a joke about college graduates never having to worry about being stranded on a desert island and not being found because the student loan commission would find them.

But it's horrible. A lot of student loan debt is actually due to predatory interest rates on those student loans, because the colleges know the students have no choice but to take it.

I was reading an interesting piece from a Financier who worked at an American bank. She described how 4 years of university had left her $140,000 in student debt and that she would be working full-time at a great job in the Financial Services sector for the next 10 years just to pay off that student debt, BEFORE she could even begin to address the issue of getting a mortgage for her first house.

Her point was, her university tuition cost her $35k per year in the USA and she now admits that she had fallen victim to a system which intentionally extracts the first 10 years of post-graduate earning power from each student in the form of grossly inflated tuition fees across the country, but most notably experienced in north-eastern USA.

To keep this in perspective, when you own a successful commercial business like a pizza shop or an apartment building for example and then you turn around and put your business up for sale on a commercial property advertising site, the price your business gets listed at by a Real Estate Company, is typically based on 10x it's average annual earnings over the previous 5 years, but is in addition to the land value itself that the commercial business sits on, assuming the land is owned by the business.

What this means is, the new owner of that business typically pays the previous owner the equivalent of what the business would have earned over the next 10 years IF the previous owner had kept the business and ran it himself!

That is precisely what American universities have been doing to students who attend American universities. The universities charge the students in tuition fees, what the student will potentially earn for the first 10 years after graduation from the kind of work which that specific Degree would have earned for the student as a credential listed on their resumé .

They chose to take specialty majors that have zero validity in the real world with little chance to make the money they assumed they would get to pay the debt.