Student Loans are the new credit cards.
You can delay the payback for years, if you keep enrolled.
The interest rate is usually lower than a credit card.
The ‘limit’ is higher.
No income check.
Co-signing not usually required.
.....and Barry’s crowd keeps hinting that Uncle Sugar will pay them off for you.
Oh yeah - There is very little relationship between what you can borrow in student loans, and your actual tuition bill. Students are encouraged to pay rent, gas, food bills with the loans.
Now days, if you go into “public service” in a goobermint approved job, you don’t have to pay back the loan, either.
And those loans can be spent on whatever you deem are “living expenses”.
You’re right, student loans are the new credit card, well, better than a credit card because you don’t have to pay it back. Work study programs are no longer necessary, and college students no longer work part time to help defray expenses, not even in the summer time. Many college students that I have known since about 2000, have spent the summers traveling the world on student loans, never having had a real job before graduation.
It used to be that it was impossible for a housewife to get a job in retail in the county where I live because all the jobs were filled with college students.