I think it was close to that 10 years ago at University of Buffalo (which is a SUNY school) if you added up tuition + room & board + textbooks + lab fees etc etc. One of my friends had I think 90k when he finished.
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Thatâs so much! My husband graduated in 2016 and he went to a CUNY school (Baruch) that was much more affordable. He also did his first two years at a community college which is super cheap in this area of the country and free in a lot of places if you get above a certain high school GPA. Lucky geography! I think SUNY Purchase is also super expensive, IIRC? And I remember some public Vermont schools were super pricy when I was applying for college. NJ is hit or miss but the community colleges are awesome, some of my best classes for sure! DH did community in MA and it was a great deal too. I feel for people who just, chose a school with no understanding of the debt. I wish it were a required course in high schools, to show people. And I wish people could see collegeâs payroll, sooooo much goes to administrators. Plus all the amenities.
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My state school tuition in Louisiana 14 years ago was about $2k-$3k a semester I think. In LA they basically pay for your state school tuition if you have any interest in going to college and have decent grades, so most people have some assistance, too. I bet the average person I knew came out of LSU with about $20-$30k of loans for a 4 year degree (including living expenses). We all had so many jobs, thoughâŚIâm sure if you werenât trying to be frugal you could maybe have gotten it up to $50k
Now I live in AZ and the local state university is around $12k a semester for 15 credit hours (thatâs in state tuition). Add room and board/rent to that and itâs easily $150K+ bachelorâs degreeâŚitâs ridiculous!
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Lol no worries! But actually if you did want to share your venmo I would totally pay for these 
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Remember the episode with the physical therapists? After they finished their programs, they assembled everyone and gave them their ânumberâ? Which was their student loan debt?
I think colleges and universities should be required to disclose something like that beforehand. With no financial aid and living on campus, with books etc. factored in, this is the cost of attending here. Subtract the amount of cash you currently have saved for college. This is the amount of your student loans.
Letâs look at the salaries pulled in by the last three graduating classes.
Hereâs the number of people who are still unemployed. Hereâs the numbers who went on to graduate school (and may be incurring more debt).
Of the percent who are employed, hereâs the median income. Hereâs the income for the 25th and 75th percentile.
For each of those, hereâs what the payback looks like for those who got the median salary and took out student loans for 100% of the total cost. Hereâs their annual payment (just below their annual income) and hereâs how long it will take to pay back these loans.
And finally, hereâs a calculator to type in your specific numbers and play the âWhat if?â game.
Ideally it would be part of the college application process.
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Yes yes yes to all of this. Also: What percent of freshman year enrollees finish in 4 years? 5? 6?
I think itâs nuts that we expect 18 year olds to make these choices. When I was 17 and got accepted to DreamSchool I told my parents I wanted to go there regardless of how much it would cost me in loans.
Luckily I got accepted somewhere else that I also liked, that gave me aid, and I ended up graduating with a much more reasonable debt load. But I donât think my parents would have stopped me from making the foolish aspirational choice.
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What is somewhat confusing to me, is that every school I got accepted to did this. Is the problem that parents are taking over and not telling their kids? On my end, my parents were not involved in any way with my college process. I even filled out the FAFSA for them after getting them to give me their tax returns. I was completely aware of the cost of attendance, what aid I was offered, and every penny I was taking out in student loans. Each year I had to sign a new master promisory note that acknowledged my cost for the year, the aid I received, and the amount I was taking out in student loans. I even filled out a petition to increase the amount I was allowed to borrow because my parents were denied the parent plus loan due to bad credit (after I pestered and walked my mom through applying). I think a lot of students put their head in the sand and choose to ignore the loan numbers that are right in front of their faces. They can also log in through studentaid.gov at any point in the process and see what their current loan balance is, even though they arenât in repayment yet if they are still in school.
On my end I was confident that I would have a job that allowed me to pay off my loans and I figured that I would come up with a plan for tackling them after I graduated. I definitely did a bit of the âhead in the sandâ thing, but I also knew that I was taking out a lot of loans and I wasnât surprised at all when I graduated and the accrued interest was tacked on. I had a rough idea of what the total balance was.
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Oh, and to add, even though I had access to my loan information the whole way through, when I graduated there was a mandatory thing I had to go to about my loans and paying them back. Every student who had loans had to attend (which at my private university wasnât actually a whole lot of the students). They gave us an envelope that had our total loan balance and information about different repayment options/plans/etc. Just like the PT school. However, it would only be a surprise I had totally ignored all of the ways I could have known all along.
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My mom thought I would have people actively working with me to find a job after graduation, connect me with corporations wanting to hire from [nationally reputable university]. Because thatâs what she experienced (graduating around 1980 with a business degree). What I had instead was ⌠nothing. I went to the career center once and got some lukewarm advice on how to make a resume. Basically once I graduated they didnât care about me at all. My mom and I only talked about this recently, we were both surprised to learn about how different our experiences were.
The numbers for tuition, etc. didnât mean anything to me because I expected to be earning $40,000 after graduation or maybe a year after graduation. The only anecdotes I heard were for bigger salaries - smaller salaries or no money donât make for good stories but college age me didnât realize there was huge confirmation basis at play in what I was hearing about. I had to keep my grades up to keep my scholarship money but my parents covered all my other costs (I got a fixed stipend and if I went through it before the end of the semester then too bad) so I didnât have any student loans at least. Then I graduated into a recession.
Oh and I had been told for years that it didnât matter what degree I got, just that I got a degree because that piece of paper was all companies cared about. I majored in English. I think if I were more career-focused to begin with maybe I would have double majored in business or something.
Interesting. Is this a common thing? Did anyone else here who took out student loans have to do this too? Did your universities actively try to connect you with jobs?
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I had mandatory student loan counseling but it was a webpage we had to check off saying we read
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My sense is that this was a post 2008 crash adjustment. I know Iâm a few years older than @Economista, so when I started college in 2006 it wasnât a thing, but they adjusted practices in response to the financial crash.
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I started out at one public, state university near my house and I also took some classes at the local community college, then during my sophomore year I applied to 3 different schools to transfer (University of Denver, Duke, and Arizona State). I decided to go to DU and started there at the beginning of my junior year. I knew there were career fairs and a career center but I didnât really care because I planned to immediately go to grad school. I stayed at DU for my masterâs and by the time graduation came around I already knew I was accepted and just going to stay and do that. I had a minor freak out about being able to support myself at the end of my first year of grad school and I had 3 of the econ professors all tell me that I never had to worry about being without a job because between the 3 of them they would make sure I always had a job. Then I got an internship that I thought was a summer internship in between years 1 and 2 of grad school, but it turned out to be an internship that was a full time job and 10 years later Iâm still at the same agency, although Iâve made my way through a few different job titles in that time.
I guess luckily I never needed to find out if my school would help me find a job? I know there is a strong alumni network and lots of alumni and networking events and I did attend a few while I was in school but I never really had to look for a job. I did get my internship after attending a career fair at the school. My other internships came from networking/my boyfriend at the timeâs parents.
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This is possible. I started college in 2007, graduated in 2011 and 2014.
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Actually, digging into this further - I guess my school did help me but it was mostly based upon the relationships I had made? During my first 2 years in Ohio I worked full time, 48 hours per week in a factory to support myself while going to school. Once I moved to Denver I worked as a tutor and in the schoolâs fitness center during the school year. For summer internships 1 was at my HI boyfriendâs dadâs company (didnât have to apply, just got it), 1 was at my boyfriendâs momâs company (did have to apply, she didnât pull any strings, but she told me it was available and that I should apply), 1 was with an economic development firm in Denver and they reached out to our Econ dept and the department head referred them to me and I accepted it. Then I had the internship with my government agency that turned into my career, which I found out about applied for because of the schoolâs career fair.
Oooh, ETA, I also remember a few times in undergrad when companies came to speak to our senior level econ classes and tried to get us to apply for open positions.
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Yes to all of this.
Most schools afaik didnât disclose things like the actual unemployment rate or incomes of their graduates. And I recall several colleges getting fined for promoting those statistics but lying about them. My school had a bunch of stats that they bragged about but all of the statistics were limited to âalumni who took jobs in their field of studyâ.
Regardless - as a teenager who had happily been making $6/hr at my high school job, any numbers over $10k just seemed like fake monopoly money. I didnât have any ballparks for what I could expect in terms of salary as an adult. My parents never told me how much they made and continued to hide it from me during the financial aid application process.
Huh, I also went to college post-recession and I donât think my school did this. Or if it did, I managed to skip it.
I assumed that since I was going to engineering school, it would turn out okay. Honestly the fact that college didnât completely screw up my finances was a matter of luck on my part.
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They are and they do! The rules are really strict, in fact, it can only take a certain number of clicks from the home page (I think 3?) to get to that information. Itâs a whole thing. Theyâre also required to post the graduation stats in terms of percent graduated and average length of time to graduate. I donât know if they are required to, but many colleges also post how quickly undergrads who have graduated get full-time jobs after graduating, and some even do that âwithin area of studyâ though thatâs an extra bonus. My school was unique in that they also published employment rates in related field to field of study but I donât think dhâs did, though they offered all the other stats.
Yeah, all the schools are required to do it. I think the problem is that parents as well as many teachers and guidance counselors (who Iâm sure are well-meaning) as well as our larger culture basically says: apply for lots of schools and go to the âbestâ one you get into. Of course âbestâ is all determined by stuff like U.S. News & World Report or Princeton Review, and âbestâ rarely has anything to do with job placement post graduation. Our culture also says spending on education is always good, education debt is good debt, always. But when youâre really paying high rates because of the state of the art theaters and football fields and six figure admin salariesâŚitâs luxury spending IMO. Itâs just not seen that way, unfortunately. I think people also believe where you go to school matters more than it does so they get sucked into the brand name and will pay way more than necessary, even when itâs not a tier 1 school. And I think there is so much rhetoric out there that it must cost like six figures to get any reasonable degree and that âeveryoneâ graduates with a huge debt burden-- and a lot of people just assume thatâs true without any research, so when they look at a super high cost school theyâre like âyep, seems about rightâ instead of âoh hell no, Iâm shopping around, looking for community schools, programs, applying for dozens of scholarships, possibly even moving states for different residency (which dh did!), etcâ.
I have a cool view because I went to college for undergrad 2005-2008 and and dh went 2012-2016-- and our experience with that stuff was relatively the same institutionally (but I did get help financially in a lump sum from family, which Iâm so thankful for, and then I had to make up the shortfall difference however, didnât get any advice on that, and manage all of it, etc- which I did via scholarships and working and community college/summer semesters- I also got a free ride to two schools which was the plan before my family randomly told me they could help and I figured out I could go to my first choice without much difference if I did it super fast. DH got zero family financial help so self-funded completely and had to work wayyy more and harder than I did, but he did get a ton of financial aid he didnât have to pay back, due to low income, which was a godsend). BUT I will also say that to stay on top of stuff you have to be pretty organized and aggressive. There were a couple of times (for both of us) where the only way we could get answers was to go sit in someoneâs office until they would speak to us. For dh it was often around credit requirements and financial aid and I had to really do some legwork to get community college credits accepted and to get credit for my internship so I could graduate early (to save money). You canât just sit back and believe what random staff tells you- get everything in writing, double and triple check, follow up, etc.
@Economista I wonder if you and I had an easier time with it all because we were old for our ages already? Like, weâd had to do a lot of figuring shit out on our own so it wasnât as steep a learning curve? I remember helping one of my roommates a lot with her financial aid, even with making calls and reading documentation because she was so overwhelmed and felt like she couldnât do it, even though she was plenty smart. I remember a lot of students also having major trouble adjusting to being away from home and basic âadultingâ for lack of a better word (ugh, lol). I taught a lot of people how to do laundry, lol, and by my second year I had a lot of people who would show up at my place for home cooked dinners, hahaha. And thus began my cooking obsession! 
I loved it.
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Yes, my school had it pre-2008! I am not positive it was mandatory but IDK why you wouldnât go! They didnât connect us directly with jobs, though. I made connections via networking at school but nothing where I got a direct job right after graduating. I graduated in 2008 right as everything crashed so I ended up waitressing and bartending for 2 years before getting a professional job. Even for work study jobs you had to apply you werenât just assigned one (I did work study and worked retail outside of school) and some jobs at the school were more competitive than others.
We did have to do an internship one semester and I know some people got jobs from that! I didnât, haha, but it was a good experience. I couldnât afford to work for free so I ended up doing a bunch of research on writing jobs that actually paid (so not publishing or publications, lol) and ended up getting a copywriting internship which was in my field since my major was Writing, Lit, and Publishing. I had never even heard of copywriting before! LOL. The school didnât want to grant me credit initially because it âwasnât real writingâ and so I wrote a long ass pedantic argument about the absurdity of that and then sat in the deanâs office until someone would tell me to my face that they wouldnât allow me credit after getting a paid internship which I beat out hundreds of applicants for. I wore them down eventually, lol, but it took a lot of effort and some letters from professors. PITA for sure. I donât think Iâve ever heard of a school that directly funnels people into jobs, except military schools obv., but a lot of people I knew got jobs through internships.
Oh man, that actually reminds me, because naturally some of the students did have like, family connections and stuff so they got jobs even tho it was 2008, and I remember one time I had to wait on a huge table of my former classmates and their families, lol. And one of them was like, âoh hey AllHat! so whatâs your job now?â and I was like, apron on pad in hand, âthis.â They got so awkward lol, and I got a big ass pity tip. 
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Looking back, the focus on internships and industry was one of the best things about the school where I ended up even if my ending up there wasnât entirely intentional. It was private (gasp!), but also much cheaper than the state university where I was living at the time (some states seem to be great about this, others are most definitely not) and the scholarship package made the decision for me.
The major thing about our internships though was that they had to be paid in order to count towards the 4 quarters requirement for graduation. Some of it Iâm sure is that my industry in general doesnât have a lot of unpaid internships (and the school most definitely worked to build a pipeline with a bunch of companies so we had options at the career fairs), but it confused the heck out of me when friends made comments about how privileged you had to be to work for a summer unpaid, and Iâm sitting here going, âUh, not sure whoâs forgetting to pay you, but thatâs covering room and board next year because work study sure as heck wonât do it.â
ETA: I can say that my job didnât come directly from my internships although I did end up back at one of the companies Iâd interned at (the group Iâd worked with and wanted to go back to were trying to make an offer, but then the whole division got chopped up and I decided to try something else instead), but being able to say that I had a year of relevant work experience out of school definitely helped with other interviews and I donât know of anyone in my specific friend group who didnât have a job offer of some sort coming out of school (2007)
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I totally agree! I think the industry focus at my school was really great! I learned a lot at my internship. I went to a private school too (for my final degree and just did public community college with credits shifting over), same deal for me, a lot of the state schools ended up being more $ once you figured in scholarships and grants and stuff. Definitely depends on where you are and probably what you study- thatâs amazing that paid internships were the norm for you! As it should be IMO!
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OMG AllHat 
this is all too good!
Hahaha would he say ⌠maybe ⌠that he HELD SOME SPACE for those feelings? 
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