Posted on 05/12/2012 7:26:12 PM PDT by Lorianne
Kelsey Griffith graduates on Sunday from Ohio Northern University. To start paying off her $120,000 in student debt, she is already working two restaurant jobs and will soon give up her apartment here to live with her parents. Her mother, who co-signed on the loans, is taking out a life insurance policy on her daughter.
“If anything ever happened, God forbid, that is my debt also,” said Ms. Griffith’s mother, Marlene Griffith.
Ms. Griffith, 23, wouldn’t seem a perfect financial fit for a college that costs nearly $50,000 a year. Her father, a paramedic, and mother, a preschool teacher, have modest incomes, and she has four sisters. But when she visited Ohio Northern, she was won over by faculty and admissions staff members who urge students to pursue their dreams rather than obsess on the sticker price.
“As an 18-year-old, it sounded like a good fit to me, and the school really sold it,” said Ms. Griffith, a marketing major. “I knew a private school would cost a lot of money. But when I graduate, I’m going to owe like $900 a month. No one told me that.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
“That’s a lot of money to spend on a no-name school!”
My thinking exactly. And that would indicate she received no ‘grants,’ i.e., the scholarship/gifts from the school itself and its various endowed funds that are used as incentive for highly prized applicants to attend.
If a school doesn’t offer at least half the “sticker” cost in grants with admission, they really don’t want you. You can attend, of course, but they want you to have to borrow that money to pay their outrageous tuition and fees.
I really feel sorry for students and their families who get suckered in this way.
She has had four years of college and the young lady cannot put together a proper English sentence.
I can hear it now...
“You mean we can bail out the biggest banks but not our children? Are our youth too big to fail? Is our future too big to fail... “ etc. etc. etc. will be repeated by the talking heads.
Little Precious can go to a state university or local community college and get a perfectly serviceable education for a lot less money and debt. It’s as if we all are compelled to buy our kids a new Porsche every year just because the dealer gave us a discount (from the hugely inflated sticker price) and a deferred, low-rate loan to cover the rest. And of course the price of Porsches would constantly rise because of this. She could have claimed some Indian blood and gotten a bigger discount.....that seems to be fairly poopular these days.
Surely she of all people can see the irony of going into debt for $120K for a degree in Marketing ...
Or maybe she just needs to spend another 100K to get her Masters, and that will make it all better!...ROTFLMAO!
Get the government out of the student loan business.
It will make it harder for the over-educated idiots and professional students to attend college, but tuition prices will immediately ratchet down for serious students seeking valuable degrees.
That was my reaction too. I don’t think Harvard even costs $50K/year.
ROI is looking pretty grim for college and even some graduate programs these days. I wonder how trade/technical schools compare.
If the Gubmint quit paying inflated tuition, tuition would quit inflating!!!
Scary.
It an epidemic, IMO. Plus, even if they were taught, not sure how many of them have the basic discipline needed to go along with such knowledge.
My husband and I have taught Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University several times as volunteers. Last week, we taught Generation Change, the teenager / college version for the first time. These kids were shocked that loans were considered financial aid, that student loans were not bankruptable and not settled like credit card debt.
The only justification for acquiring outrageous loans might be some very misguided belief that there is going to be incredible inflation in the (near) future, so that these loans would be less than a monthly credit card payment. This is still possible.
“It may very well be that a college education is revenue-negative.”
You know, I really don’t think I could hire anyone with a degree in “cultural studies” for a job, even for a job requiring skills in cultural studies. It would be hilarious to think that in the future, you might not even put such information on your resume; it would be something that you hope that your employer doesn’t dig up!
How dare you impugn the dignity and honor of used car salesmen!
Was just chatting w/ a fellow classmate. She’s a very nice girl, and has a good job as a nurse, but she’s six figures in debt because she tried med school a while back and couldn’t cut it.
My jaw just DROPPED. Over 100K in debt. She is newly married and trying now to obtain a masters in nursing.
I felt like saying ...good luck ever owning a home. Good luck putting your own kids through college. Good luck staying out of debt ....what ARE these people going to do with their lives??
My husband and I have had our share of tough times, and have been in debt, but each time we managed to pay it down, and get ahead. These people will NEVER, EVER get ahead. Not with debt like that.
Oh, for Pete’s sake, who goes into debt for school that they just cannot handle? You know if you are smart enough to handle medical school or not.
The students that I see with that amount of debt have simply worked the system to skate through college, not working a day in their lives and then moved on to grad school These kids travel during their vacations on borrowed money, claiming that it’s educational or a matter of social justice.
I just have no sympathy for anyone who lives off of borrowed money and expects some sort of break.
This is a town so small that the nearest movie theater is more than thirty miles away, at least it was when I visited the school in 1984. I chose a school that was in a town with a mall and a movie theater. I stand corrected, they now seem to have a movie theater
The best advice ever given about college is that if it doesn’t say Harvard or Yale on the top of the sheep skin it might as well say I Screw U. Go to a local community college, stay at home transfer to the local state college after associates degree and work entire time.
Do NOt BORROW MONEY FOR SCHOOL!
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