Carnegie Mellon worth the cost?

nemom
Sun, 25 Apr 2010 21:46:09 +0000

Best of luck - I think that 80,000 is just too much debt. Looking at a finaid calculator, you would need a salary of 75 to 100/annual to pay it off IN TEN YEARS. For five years, you would need 125 to 185K. Great as CMU is, you are not going to be making that right off the bat.
Paying off 20K - that requires a salary of about $31 to 47K.
Again, I love CMU! It’s on my child’s short list. But 80K is a lot of money. Think of it in pragmatic terms. It’s buying a decent little car every year for FOUR years. It’s buying a small house in a lot of the country. It’s probably your entire pretax income for a year or more.