With 18 million individuals each year leaving high school and moving up to a four-year college, it’s a wonder how each one of them will pay for the high costs of tuition. Sure, there are scholarships and if you are lucky, your parents, but what about the students who don’t have any of that and have to pay for it all by themselves? The obvious answer is student loans, which are now more than ever easier to obtain, but is it worth it?
In an article by Peter Coy entitled “Student Loans: Debt for Life”, Coy makes the argument that college could not be worth it. As of 2012, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced that student debt had passed $1 trillion. Not only that, the average cost of an out of state college is around twenty five thousand dollars, which does not include the cost of living and books. With the high cost of tuition, many students are regretting finishing their degree.
Christina Mills, 30, of Minneapolis, is one of those students. Mills worked for a non-profit organization at the time and you can only imagine her reaction when she found out her student loans would be 1,400 dollars a month. Mills stated she instantly started to cry in her car when she found out, her student loans cost more than her paycheck.
Christina Mills is not the only one. Thomas Smith, a medical student of Hamilton NJ is $310,000 in debt. Not only that, he is already struggling to make ends meet even before he has to start paying the loans off. In a quote he said to Coy, he states that “I don’t even know what I eat” and “I just go to the supermarket and buy the cheapest thing I can buy and as much of it as I can”.
In an interview with Michael DiPietro, 25, of Brooklyn, DiPierro states that he has about 100,000 dollars of debt that he has accumulated by achieving his bachelor’s degree in fashion, sculpture and performance. He has been waiting tables for 2 years and still has no idea how he is going to pay off his loans. “I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s an obsolete idea that a college education is like your golden ticket,” DiPietro says. “It’s an idea that an older generation holds on to.”
With the fear of how much debt many individuals will achieve along with the possibility of getting out of college and not being able to find a job, students are beginning to turn away from the idea of going to college to get a higher education. Here at iQ Technologies, we believe in the success of all students, and the various ways one can achieve their fullest potential is either for American colleges to lower their tuition fees or a more cost effective route is to gain a Diploma through the various online education courses offered through a myriad of Universities.
We can fight back the rising costs of tuition by finding creative ways to finish a degree. Through online classes, employee education incentives (your company pays a portion of your tuition), and scholarships (thousands go unused each year) we can still find avenues to obtain a degree and maintain good credit.
Source: Peter Coy, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-09-06/student-loans-debt-for-life