Damn Student Loans

So yeah, it was a ... great school :)

Ah yes, the special breeding of the spoilt fuckwad.

To over-recycle an over-recycled phrase, Hampshire is spoiled on Hampshire students. But it's really so very very true.

(Ally and I cannot talk very long without bringing up either Hampshire or urinals, I think.)

Time assumes you will make more money from your degree - not a guarantee with many degrees. And school costs you money at the very begining (time value of money), when you should be saving and investing it. Of course this assumes that a 18 year old will actually be doing this, which is actually a silly thing to assume.

But the real problem is that the educational system is fundamentally fucked up. What is now "college"-level education should start in high school (and therefore be paid for by the gov). I got my bachelors in three years by taking advanced placement classes in high school for college credit.

I don't think it assumes that, per se, it's just based on statistics: people with college degrees, on average, make more money. On average, if all you have is an undergraduate degree (and so automatically doctors and lawyers are out of this), you make the same amount of money regardless of what that degree is in (of course, that should practically go without saying; if you're really going to pursue high-paying work in the field of your degree, you're probably going to go to graduate school.)

And nabisco -- Hampshire's scholarship money is, if not entirely need-based, need-based enough that I'm not aware of anyone who received merit-based scholarships from them, beyond the few little things like "this money is earmarked for students of American-Asian descent pursuing a career in sociology," and the usual very-specific funds like that which are set up by alumni.

Fletrejet: a college degree -- in any discipline, a degree period -- raises your earnings. Dramatically. Look through entry-level job listings sometime, and note how many simply require a college degree. Note how many art-history majors from good schools are able to pack up upon graduation and become consultants.

My dad makes less than I do for a family of 5 (6 according to FAFSA), 4 of which (5 according to FAFSA) attend college. He has no money. However, considering his income means my "income" doubles on the financial aid forms, ie I apparently now have $100k of income on hand, and the fact that I am "dependent" means that my rent or living expenses are not of consequence, because my ENTIRE SALARY is "disposable income", since my parents are "supporting me". Basically, according to the way financial aid works, my job is the equivalent of working at the local Best Buy afterschool for cigarette money. My "expected family contribution" is something like $30k--more than half of my salary.

Merit-based scholarships aren't helpful if you aren't already attending the school and have grades for them to base merit on (ie the GS scholarship at Columbia).

Why would you need to be already attending a school to draw merit-based scholarships? My entire college career was funded by merit-based scholarships.

OH my god, Ally, you are so OTM!!!! I have always been upset by this. Most of my friends in college not only had their tuitions paid by their parents, but also got checks in the mail to spend as they pleased. (and didn't have to pay for their first cars, but anyway) Meanwhile, I was poor then and poor now and will owe lots and lots of money forever and ever amen. Bah Humbug! Hallelujah! aMen!

So some of the phrasing strikes me as a little weird: I mean, say what you want about the details of federal aid, which is administratively wonky in a thousand ways, but the basic idea remains that it'll provide loans to cover the amounts the family can't be expected to. My parents don't have that much money = I got lots of loans; I can't really sneer at the many people I know whose families just paid their tuition outright, cause it's not like that had anything to do with that.

The basis for independence, per FAFSA: military member, orphan, graduate student, or over the age of 24. Tax status doesn't enter into it. "Extraordinary situations" are granted forebearance over the rules--mine counts, BUT they won't just accept my word for it (I suppose for obvious enough reasons, such as the high rate of lying in society and all).

Heh, nabisco, the general studies school is for unusual instance students, ie people who probably don't have the strongest academic backgrounds but who have shown ability to succeed otherwise (good essay + strong resume etc). It has a completely different criteria for admission than the other schools at Columbia. I'm a high school drop-out=merit-based scholarships outside the realms of college-grade-based have absolutely zippo interest in me. I have no high school grades to base a merit scholarship on because I left at the end of junior high. Hampshire, to tie in that discussion, has a similar "unusual student background" instance in a lot of them--an inordinant amount of home schoolers go there, for example.

I mean, merit-based scholarships are great and all in general, I'm definitely not knocking them, but there are certainly plenty of instances that don't involve being-not-good-enough-to-merit where they wouldn't work out for someone.

What I don't understand is why this system is set up this way anyway. There are more than enough other countries where schooling IS considered a right and not a privledge.

Sarah, that's the same thing I see a lot too. I mean, cool, good up on them, but jesus christ, it's kind of to the point of making it nearly 100% exclusionary of other people. Yeah, sure, you poor people can go to state college, it's practically free...um, good up if you live in Amherst, Mass., since UMass is one of the top 30 (?) ranked undergrads in the US, bad news if that means you have to attend Hunter Fucking College.

Let's face something here: who is more likely to be living off their parents at the age of 24, a person with well-off parents or a person from the working or poor classes?

Quite honestly this discussion ties directly into the ones from during the "war" in regards to whether or not people should support the troops and their motivations for being in the military: note that you CAN get federal aid if you join the armed forces.

And yes, state schools should receive more funding.

Anyway. I'm just pointing out that there's a difference between "I deserve your aid to complete a college education" and "I deserve enough of it to attend a highly-selective private school" -- the same difference between "I deserve a car" and "I deserve a Ferrari." The problem, as I see it, is more that a car and a Ferrari are both going to get you where you're attempting to go, whereas that selective private-school education confers substantial benefits not as available from the other.

That said, I think people seriously underestimate what a good student can do coming from an affordable college -- whether by transferring to a more selective school after developing the sort of track record that would entice scholarships, or by making that jump when moving on for a graduate degree. This isn't at all to deny that there are giant and often unfair advantages to having a big name on that undergraduate degree, but you'd be surprised how many people do well enough at state or small private colleges to do their graduate work someplace name-y. My own brother did his undergrad at a tiny and not exactly hot school in Missouri and then went to Harvard Law.

Your "fact" completely ignores the instances that both me and Tep brought up of other students. This is just playing semantics with the way we phrased our discussion at this point. I think it is rather clear from what has been said that the issue is that students whose parents have enough money that said students can be paid for and don't need more than a typical "afterschool job" can get more aid than someone like me or Tep. Is this really that hard to comprehend? Example: Take two 22 year olds, for example myself and a boy (who I happen to like a lot, he's very nice) in my English class. He comes from a middle class background, and his parents help him significantly. He does not work, because of this. This is all good and well for him. I haven't got this support, and my living expenses (and I'm talking boiled down rent-food(which I barely eat to begin with expenses, not my frivolous ones)-utilities are thousands a month. I'm not complaining, I live a good life. HOWEVER, the fact that we are the same age ad no other mitigating factor means that we are getting the same support to attend any school.

And I wouldn't still be tight paying for state school without the help, as well, so it's kind of silly.

Like I said, there are plenty of examples of other countries who have set up their system in a more evenly balanced way, and it works marvellously.

Feel free to go read the FAFSA guidelines on independence/dependence and the way disbursement works, they're online. If you are under 24, you can get more money out of them by quitting your job and living off your parents. Which happens to only be a viable option if you happen to have decently well-off parents.

It's Friday afternoon, nabisco. And I'm not an argumentative person. I'm sorry if I upset you. I suppose I do get a bit jealous of the very wealthy. As my mom always says, 'Life's not fair.'

Sarah: I should also probably explain where I'm coming from with this. I was lucky enough to finish high school in a state with good public schools: I could have gone to the University of Michigan for free, saving myself and my family loads of money and coming out without an ounce of debt. I often think I should have done that. But I went to an expensive private school instead and have come out saddled with debt. I try not to complain too much about that debt because I made, at some point, a decision that it was worth it for the benefits of attending that expensive private school, a decision I'm hoping will turn out looking like the right one. And yeah, half of the people I know from school just had their tuitions paid flat-out by family and don't have to worry about any of this, but if I let this bother me very much I'd have put a gun to my head before I was done with my freshman year.

In my case, the benefits of going to the expensive private school aren't actually that huge, name-wise: the University of Michigan is a good enough school that having Northwestern on my diploma instead actually isn't conferring that huge of a boost to my prospects. (Not like, say, Indiana vs. Harvard or something.) I do think the federal aid system needs to move in the direction of recognizing that an education at a selective school really is substantially more valuable than the equivalent education at a state school, which it does in part now but not nearly as much as I think any of us would like. On the other hand, making sure everyone who merits admission to an Ivy can afford it doesn't actually correct this problem. What would correct it, as mentioned, would be a much greater investment in raising the standards of state schools and the numbers of good ones. People wouldn't need or even want to beg for enough aid to afford a luxury school if the bulk of them had decent state schools available to them. (Move to Michigan, everyone!)

If anyone does have some good advice for me on how to get any help with this, please email me? I mean, I reckon I can get through the year-of-dependence, as I've decided just now this is called, but it's just looming over my head, the fact that I don't really know how to do anything at this point, I feel my hands are tied. Any non-govermental loan pointers or tips, etc. would be appreciated muchly.

I was apologizing to keep this a discussion rather than a catty insulting argument, but hey, no luck there. "Heaven forbid" you take a fucking apology in kind.

My point's simply that it's alloted based on what you or "your family" can afford; the more you have, the less you get.

I'm not following, nabisco -- if it's something obvious, blame the heavy drinking I've done today/tonight. Not everyone who went to Hampshire was a wealthy kid -- the ones who got the major aid, for instance, weren't. Hampshire's essential approach was to sprinkle small amounts of work-study over a large portion of the student body, and then to take a small number of kids from non-wealthy families and give them full- or close-to-full scholarships. That way they could point both to "oh, 75% of our students have financial aid" and "we gave out such-and-such number of full scholarships last year," even while the bulk of the student body was paying tuition, room, board, and expenses out of pocket.

It's a large reason why the freshman attrition rate was as high as two-thirds.

no offense, Nabisco, I like you and yer posts generally ... but the above is pretty darn ignorant. the above is only true only if you went to one of the top law schools (like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, or Chicago) -- if you went anywhere else, and didn't graduate in the top 10% of yer class and/or got onto law review, the law firms that pay top dollar nowadays will tell you to go pound sand. i went to an OK public law school, did OK but not spectacular (i.e., graduated top half of class and made a journal), graduated when the market was still hot, i didn't get a job with any Wall Street/Big Law firm, and i don't make anywhere near what folks in those firms make. nor do most freshly-minted attorneys.

While I was earning my economics degree, for the first two years of my college education, I went to a private, "well-regarded" university (I don't know how truly well-regarded it is -- it was Trinity University, fyi). Then, when the loans multiplied so scarily fast that I didn't see myself catching up to them in the five year period I had set up at the beginning, and when my dad's health started deteriorating to the point where I was starting to be responsible for a hell of a lot of things, I finished up my degree at a public university (the University of Texas at San Antonio). Well, what I found was that the education I got at the private institution was really not that top-notch, and I actually had better professors, better facilities, and a generally better education at the public university.

Just to break it all down to you: The tuition at the private university I was attending was $20,000/year. I got a scholarship at the end of my high school career that covered half that tuition, while a series of loans I took out paid for the rest. It's simple math really -- I owed $20,000 by the time I transfered to a public university. Tuition at the public university was $2,000/year. In exchange for taking special care of my father, my parents paid for the tuition as we went along (and my family's not wealthy -- we're probably on the borderline between "working class" and "middle class", so it's not as though I was being spoiled by this, and besides, I decided to be a commuter student because I had to stay in a dorm for the first year of college and it sucked).

I have a job that could be considered a career now, so with the money I'm earning I can pay off my student loans and help out with utilities around the house. (I'm still living here because my mother certainly couldn't take care of my father alone and I'm not about to do what's expected of me by society and leave my parents in the lurch. Besides, it allows me to save bigtime money-wise and thus be able to tackle my student loans, which in just one year are already halfway paid off.) What I'm discovering right now, being Out There in the Real World, is that most employers don't really care that much where you graduate from. What they look for is whether the school's accredited by the usual suspects, what your GPA is/was, what your extracurricular activities was (so thank God my private university had us do volunteer work and my public university had a couple of organizations I got involved with). I know that when the HR director at my job looked at my collegiate history, she was more impressed with my GPA than with my choice of college.

I think that if you're looking out for your finances while you pursue the dream of higher education, you should stick with a good public university or a less expensive private university, and make sure you get really good grades. Then, when finding a place of employment, search for one that will pay for a graduate education, and go to a good school then. I'm going with a degree that has more of a chance to earn me more money and that I somehow feel is more suited to me (the computer science degree), but while I'm an undergrad I'm quite happy to go to a public university. However, it would be very nice to earn my master's at MIT or Stanford, so that's what I'll be angling for, and I'm convinced I will be able to swing it when the time comes. Hopefully my mother can come with me wherever I go, so I can help take care of her (her health is fairly bad, too).

Or you could take out multiple loans to go to wherever you want to go to. Whichever, really. It depends on how much you want to work to get your degree. And believe me, those people who goof off during college and don't take education seriously will really suffer in the long run. As one of my old advisors said, "You can either choose to have fun for four years and work hard for the rest of your life, or work hard for four years and have fun for the rest of your life."

I really can't contribute anything to this discussion in practical terms -- my parents set aside college money for me starting at birth, and a combination of regular payments to the fund and some shrewd investing meant my entire experience at UCLA was paid for and then some, as I also received some academic scholarships as well. My graduate experience was covered by a four-year fellowship that handled all costs and guaranteed TA work as well; it was when this ended, in combination with other reasons, that I realized the academic life just wasn't one for me, and so I left rather than accumulate debt in pursuit of something that was driving me nuts. I may not be getting the high-flying job or anything, but I am comfortable, I can indulge myself as needed and I have no debt hanging over my head from schooldays -- but I also realize that this was initially as a result of a combination of particular factors that I had no control over, and I am grateful for it. Some of the stories I've read here just plain anger me, the more so because people I consider friends are suffering as a result.

At any length... *hugs*, and Ned, your parents were s-m-a-r-t.

Delurking a bit more now, obv.

I think student loans suck ass in general. Only if you pay more than what the statements say you owe can you actually find anything advantageous about them.

I didn't qualify for jack when it came to financial aid the first go around. All I had to pay the tuition were my scholarship and the loans I took out. I found that only the super-poor and those who knew how to work the system (e.g. lying on their tax returns) got all the benefits. Maybe some of you who've posted before could've qualified for a lot more than what you're getting. Ally, you seem to me to be an individual who would qualify for tons of stuff, if not now, then a bit later. There are tons of scholarships out there -- get someone in the financial aid office on your side! I had a good friend in financial aid who found for me some loans with low interest rates. (It was the best she could do for me at the time.)

I'm not bitter about any of it, though. I value my education now, and would choose a degree over no loans any day of the week.

*hugs to everyone*

I must confess that my parents had a college fund for me too, but they blew it all on furniture when I was 6. Oh, we'll pay it back some day. And then they got a divorce. So, maybe if they hadn't bought that furniture and had stayed together, I would have been one of those kids whose parents paid their way. Life's just funny like that.

So, whatever else you do, I'd say pay them as much as you possibly can while you're attending. It also made me study much harder as screwing up a class doesn't seem real practical when you know that each class session is actively costing you two hundred and fifty dollars.