Posted on 06/12/2013 3:46:33 AM PDT by lowbridge
By the time Ken Ilgunas was wrapping up his last year of undergraduate studies at the University of Buffalo in 2005, he had no idea what kind of debt hole he'd dug himself into.
He had majored in the least marketable fields of study possible — English and History — and had zero job prospects after getting turned down for no fewer than 25 paid internships.
"That was a wake-up call," he told Business Insider. "I had this huge $32,000 student debt and at the time I was pushing carts at Home Depot, making $8 an hour. I was just getting kind of frantic."
Back then, student loans had yet to become the front page news they are today. Ilgunas could have simply deferred his loans or declared forbearance. He also could have asked his parents (who were more than willing to help) for a leg up. He could have thrown up his hands and gone to grad school until the job market bounced back.
Instead, he moved to Alaska and spent two years paying back every dime. And when he enrolled at Duke University for graduate school later, he lived out of his van to be sure he wouldn't have to take out loans again.
"I had no idea what I was getting into at the time. I didn't even know what interest was when I was 17," he said. "I just think that's awfully indicative of the incredibly poor personal finance education young people have at that time in their lives."
In his book, "Walden on Wheels: On The Open Road from Debt to Freedom," Ken chronicles his journey out of debt.
He was kind enough to share his story with us this week.
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
The hint here is that he left after getting his bachelor’s degree...got a job...worked for two years to pay off debts. Then he came back to graduate school. If you go back to the 1950s and 1960s....that was typically the way that most people did the degree programs.
It is completely irrational to me that parents are allowing their kids to enroll in often mediocre large out of state schools, racking up $30-40,000 in debt per YEAR. Beyond the fact,they are earning degrees in majors that without a post graduate degree will only garner them a job at home depot.
Unfortunately the era of social media esp facebook, makes it seem like college is a four year camp with some classes thrown in. It’s become a right of passage for many middle class kids... to go away to school.
The universities are making the most of the easy flow of student loan money, by enticing the students with ever larger and pricier freshman celebration weeks featuring top billed pop stars.
I lived in a1966 VW camper van for a few months in college. I parked it free in a state park that was closed and unstaffed after Labor Day. The showers in the gym at school were fine. One of the three part time jobs I had was in a bakery so I ate pretty well. I had a fine sleeping bag so I really wasn’t cold much. Who knew it was a newsworthy story?
“He had majored in the least marketable fields of study possible — English and History”
Unless your considering being a teacher I guess.....
>>Unless your considering being a teacher I guess.....
Maybe he is a white male, so that career path is even closed. Perhaps he could get in with a waiver if he’s gay, but....
Graduate degrees can often make someone less employable.
An English degree can get you into industry if you work it right.
We need a white Martin Luther King.
Face it, the level of effort to pass one engineering class exceeds and entire semester of effort for a history / English major.
This is the typical unobservant young and our current society. You can only learn from ‘education people’, and too much emphasis on a formal degree (of any kind).
The person never observed the parents paying their bills, even if personal finance was not a talked about topic at home?
Boring as it might be, somebody's got to write those SOPs...
I find some of those non techies are jealous of the salaries that the tech folk get. Heck they make pretty good money considering that they did not have to go through the rigors of an engineering curriculum.
Someone needs to sit kids down before they enroll in useless degree programs and spell out the consequences for them, in start, numerical terms.
There needs to be an explanation that getting Yet Another Bogus Liberal Arts Degree doesn’t make the child a More Special Snowflake. It simply makes for another unemployed kid sleeping on mom’s couch in four years.
People are only paid what the market says their work is worth... and that's true of tech writers and engineers alike.
> We need a white Martin Luther King.
The difference now is that 0 would James Earl Ray him in 2 seconds then show up at his funeral to speak about how great a man he was and how much potential he would have had of live but only for that tragic horrible accident.
So can a certificate in machining, diesel mechanics, an electrician’s license, plumbing experience, etc. And the kid won’t have to “work it right.” Just show up on time, dressed for work in the interview and have a go-to-work attitude.
And they’d make more money with less debt.
No one calls an English major at 0300 to get verbs conjugated.
People do call plumbers at odd hours... and plumbers get to charge hefty rates because of it.
>>We need a white Martin Luther King.
We probably have one, but the media quotes him out of context and selectively shows soundbites and we declare him to be a racist and shun him.
I screwed up. I sent my son to college when I should have just bought him a McDonald’s franchise.
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