October 30, 2008 – 12:24 pm
I think I’m supposed to put in some generic message encouraging everyone to get out and vote. If college costs are a big issue for you– and I don’t think they should be given the magnitude of other issues– then here’s some help. The NY Times devotes an entire article to the two candidates plans [...]
October 28, 2008 – 11:46 am
What if you graduate and don’t make enough money to pay off your loans? There are some options, but they all postpone the inevitable. Sigh. Eileen Ambrose at the Baltimore Sun gives some help negotiating the maze of options.
October 28, 2008 – 11:44 am
The easiest way to get credit now is to get someone with cash to co-sign your loan. At least according to this posting highlighting some reporting by the AP.
October 28, 2008 – 11:43 am
Places to avoid. Well, that’s not exactly true. There are some educations that are hard to get in other places. Johns Hopkins is a great place if you know you want to do medical research. But there are good medical researchers at the University of Maryland just around the corner.
October 24, 2008 – 9:28 pm
CNN’s Jen Haley has a positively scary story about how some people are leaving the US to escape their crushing loans. Don’t miss the music major who ended up with $160,000 in debt from a fancy school and now can’t make the payments. Someone told him it would only be $600 a month to pay [...]
October 21, 2008 – 11:48 am
The Boston Globe’s Peter Schworm chimes in with a good survey of the new interest in reasonably-priced college educations.
October 21, 2008 – 11:30 am
Political pressure on relatively rich universities is building at least in the office of one legislator up in Massachusetts. Chadwick Matlin reports in The Big Money on one man’s push to squeeze the big, fat universities up in the Bay State. We don’t think the Massachusetts legislature has a chance, but it will push the [...]
October 20, 2008 – 12:11 pm
529 savings plans are down. Loans are disappearing. Nancy Trejos at Washington Post summarizes what this website has been telling the world for months. Still, it’s worth reading just to see how the inside the beltway crowd is coming to view the problem.
October 20, 2008 – 12:08 pm
Jackie Cross of the Minneapolis Star Tribune profiles one young couple with good jobs and a college debt that sucks it all up. “We pay just under $800 a month in student loans,” said Matt, 25, who got an associate degree in graphic design from Minnesota’s Brown College in 2004. “Almost my entire paycheck, just [...]
October 20, 2008 – 11:50 am
Or so quotes Justin Pope of the Associated Press in this article. Erin O’Connell took the tour this week at Elon University, a handsome, up-and-coming college with a $31,000-a-year price tag. That’s hefty — but $20,000 less than some “uppity” schools she may have to cross off her list.
October 18, 2008 – 12:41 pm
The NY Times just contributed an editorial condemning the way that Universities encourage students to get new credit cards by selling the lists of student names to the credit card companies. If student loans are dangerous tools, we think that credit card debt is even more dangerous.
October 14, 2008 – 11:29 am
Hmm. This fascinating story for insiders recounts how schools are grappling with the fact that no private entity wants to lend money to pay for their product. If loans become scarce, colleges might have to establish pay-over-time systems, in which students have an entire semester to pay for classes. Because that requires colleges to absorb [...]
October 14, 2008 – 11:20 am
I love the theater. Drama and literature are an important lens for understanding our life on earth. But don’t be foolish about it. This perfectly nice story from CBS describes some perfectly nice kid from perfectly nice parents who wants to make a life on stage. That’s fine. But do you really need to spend [...]
October 14, 2008 – 11:08 am
The Chicago Tribune’s Megan Twohey wrote a very nice, straight-forward article puncturing the need to spend so much on college. If you’re going to choose a low wage job, don’t suck up debt because you won’t be able to afford to live. Even fancy degrees from the so-called “best colleges” don’t always pay. A sobering [...]
October 13, 2008 – 12:31 pm
Bankruptcy can’t save you from student loans. Here’s a second story from Nick Perry at the Seattle Times. He opens with the horror story of Lora Ladd, a young woman who now manages to owe $52,000+ on her student loans. She only borrowed $20,000+, but the fees, penalties and interest. Whoo hoo. Isn’t America grand? [...]
October 13, 2008 – 12:14 pm
We’ve avoided talking much about the fallout on Wall Street because most of it is probably an overreaction. Yes, the pain from the housing debt will hurt the economy but it surely won’t be as bad as some of the panic stricken believe. (Famous last words.) But let’s talk a minute about those who took [...]
October 10, 2008 – 1:30 pm
Everyone who reads a history of financial train wrecks in the past always gets to some paragraph where the author says something like, “Instead of stopping, they borrowed more money making it worse.” This happened with the Savings and Loan crisis in the 1980s and it looks like it’s happening here. Senator Chuck Schumer, a [...]
October 8, 2008 – 11:32 am
It may just be the climate on Wall Street, but the WSJ’s Sue Shellenbarger found a trend in kids who need a bailout with their college loans. In many cases, it’s not really a bailout because the parents cosigned the loan. So if Johnny can’t get a absolutely great job, he won’t be able to [...]
October 6, 2008 – 11:37 am
The stories about college loans often talk about how the average debt is say $10,000. I don’t know where they find these averages because many people end up borrowing that much for a semester alone. This journalist was able to find people with a debt of $152,000, another with $272,000 and a third with $100,000. [...]
October 6, 2008 – 11:29 am
Is this possible? A good, basic article about the crushing debt taken on by students includes a startling statistic: The proportion of freshmen and sophomores at four-year colleges who will default on federal loans over their lifetime is estimated at between 19 and 31 percent, depending on the type of loan and when it was [...]
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