Living the American Dream… or the nightmarish version of it.
Moving for economic opportunities (i.e. jobs) is what built this country. Whether it was the dust bowl, the depression, the end of slavery, GI’s coming home from the front, or the “Acres and a Mule”- that’s what you did.
I don’t understand this generations whinging about having to move to get a job (or a better job). I speak with kids all the time who are plopped on mom’s sofa, using the wi-fi, and instagramming their lives of underemployment and how student loans suck. Some of them actually turned down better jobs- they interviewed with a national company, but instead of getting an offer from the office in Seattle, they got an offer from a division based in Columbus, OH. Nope, “not worth it”. Or the company they worked for as an intern made them an offer to start in a management rotation program in Hartford, not the more glamorous job in DC. So no- it’s back to mom’s working minimum wage at their old HS job waiting for… I’m not sure what.
Don’t enable your kids by pretending that everyone starts life in a great apartment in SF. Don’t enable your kids by pretending that you’d fall apart if they lived far away from you. Kids go where the jobs are, period full stop. Sometimes they luck out and that means Austin, and sometimes they have to be a good sport about Toledo.
There was no Skype and Facetime or email or free global communications back in the day and somehow all of our ancestors managed to move away from mom and dad. You live in Altoona and there are no jobs there for a college graduate in your field? You can’t find Atlanta on a map???
post #56:
Grammar and spelling Nazi to self: “reining”, not “reigning”. Ugh. ?
@mwolf - come on, I graduated college in the 80s and had a job making less than 20K a year and managed to pay off my 25K, so no 35K is not insurmountable at all. And I assure you that the interest rates were far less favorable than anything in the recent past. My first mortgage was at 15% - so cry me a river about today, its no worse.
Ok - I am the last person who is going to defend this guy. However, if his parents co-signed for 120K undergrad, yep they’re on the hook. I’ve told my kids upfront roughly what we can afford (we have a little give for the right program). They CAN take the federal limit loans, but it would be better to get an undergrad debt free. But that’s it. There’s no “dream” school. Cosigning that size of a loan for an 18 year old who likely has absolutely no clue is just stupid. This guy compounded the problem by just going on to grad school for 70K. My kid had to say no to a bunch of fancy private schools this spring. Anyway - don’t cosign or take a parent plus unless you can afford to pay even if that isn’t the intention. Why should the 18 year old have had the wisdom not to do this but the parents didn’t?
Anyway - I’m not necessary against some loan forgiveness, but not for situations like this. However, it does absolutely nothing for the actual problem that not everyone has a truly affordable option available to them. I’d much rather see everyone had an option that was no more than 10% of parental income. I’d like to see more regulation of predatory lending. Who gives another 75K to someone with 120K in student debt? Why wasn’t this kid counseled into a community college at first?
The entitlment of this guy is definitely grating.
I think we all know kids who made poor decisions with student loan money, such as
- doing a study abroad program and treating it like a vacation
- going on Spring Break
- taking a 5th year due to poor planning
- going away to a residential college rather than commuting to an equivalent college
- choosing a more expensive school over a less expensive one for a reason other than academics
As a taxpayer, I really don’t want to be paying for loan forgiveness for these poor decisions. None of these things adds to the education of the individual. Some of these things adds to the maturity of the individual, but for that they can take a gap year and work for the year.
I said it in another thread and I’ll say it here too. I wouldn’t mind getting rid of or reducing interest on loans. But I’m against getting rid of principal. People have to have personal responsibility/accountability.
Hopefully, these are not federally guaranteed loans, otherwise we taxpayers are stuck with it.
@MusakParent I agree with you – my husband and I will not co-sign loans for our kids for that reason (we have 5)
@MusakParent wrote
He was. He attended community college for 3 years, earning an Associate’s in “Professional Studies.” Then he went on to spend another 3 years earning his BA at Rutgers. Two years after finishing at Rutgers he went back for a Master’s at, we would assume, the age of 26 or 27. It appears to have been a 16 month program currently costing out-of-staters $31,619.35 and including a paid internship. Borrowing 75K for this program was totally unnecessary. I call BS on his sob story.
Sounds like he was using the money to support himself in a relatively high standard of living, rather than a typical student situation of sharing a room and eating cafeteria food.
Going into debt for this reason is not unique to college students. Also common is a less extreme version, where someone spends all of a high income, leaving nothing to save for longer term goals like retirement or kids’ college.
I wonder if Simon is going to take on the caregiving for his parents when they need it. He won’t be able to pay for private caregivers, so he just might have to! (Does his culture frown on placing elders in nursing homes? If so, he’s going to be the one responsible, unless there are other siblings he can dump the responsibility on.)
Karma could take many forms for this self-centered young man…
@toomanyteens You are blatantly ignoring basic facts about cost of living changes over years.
CoL in the 1980s was less than half of what it is today, and your $20K was about $48K in today’s money and your $25K loans were about $60K.
A kid who is making $48K today has about $39K in hand, and, spending $25K for basic costs, can pay $900 a month, and pay back that $60K in 5.5 years, while having about $250 a month put aside for emergencies. If you compound interest, you can add on some three years.
Unfortunately, if they are getting $36K a year, taking home $28,000, and paying $25K for basic costs, that leaves only about $250 a month, which would take 15 years to pay back $45,000, while having $0 to put aside for emergencies. So, if your car breaks down, that’s a few months that you cannot pay back student loans, or maybe not eat. Compound interest, add a year or two of unemployment, and you get another decade or more.
So you are comparing your situation, in which you got a very good salary and did not have issues of unemployment, to kids who have minimal salary and likely were unemployed, and saying that they could have paid back as much as you did.
“if his parents co-signed for 120K undergrad, yep they’re on the hook.”
Parents have to be the “adults in the room” when the decisions are made regarding spending on college. Someone has to be willing to say “no”.
I am concerned that all of the talk by politicians about loan forgiveness might be encouraging some kids, and possible some of their parents, to think that they might as well take out loans because eventually someone will get elected who is going to pay them off.
@MWolf - you said 35K, I had 25K, It took me 10 years to pay it off, which was the norm. I got a very good salary of less than 20K a year? Really? Even then that wasn’t a good salary. I worked an extra job, it sucked but I did it. What on earth makes you think there wasn’t possible unemployment? We got a kick out of pasting the rejection letters to our dorm doors. Oh yeah I did say dorm because we didn’t think we HAD to have an off campus apartment just because we were seniors.
I had my student loan, a car payment, my half of the apartment (which by the way was a $550 a month apartment in CT that long ago), insurance, food, gas, clothing just like everyone else today.
We do kids a disservice making it sound like they have it SO much harder than we did – they don’t. All the costs are relative as is the salary.
A sad state of affairs, I don’t know how any of them can sleep at night!
The average starting salary is $50k, not $36k. Assuming they start at $36k, their salary isn’t stuck there. If you make the pessimistic assumptions someone starts at $36k, never gets another raise, and doesn’t qualify for some type of loan forgiveness, then I agree college isn’t a great deal financially in your scenario.
https://www.naceweb.org/about-us/press/2018/overall-starting-salary-for-class-of-2017-remains-flat/
On our way home today the radio was playing a Discover ad where the dad was stressing about college. The son questions him saying something to the effect of, “I thought I was the one going to college.” The dad then tells him he’s stressing about paying for it. The smart lad then tells dad they can get Discover Student Loans and only 15 minutes to approval!
Does anyone really wonder how families can get these loans? “It’s so easy! Problem of paying for college solved!” Not one word was said about interest or paying them back - just that Discover gives some credit for good grades without defining what that is. I doubt it means you can pay back less than you borrow…
@toomanyteens A loan of $35,000 would still take about 12 years to pay off at $250 a month, and $20,000 in 1985 wasn’t that much lower than the median household income of about $23,600.
@varker Considering how badly the Baby Boomers messed up the economy and the environment, I’m also surprised.
I’m constantly amused how the Baby Boomers, while living comfortably on an economy built on their parents’ taxes, voted to cut taxes, and have left their own kids and grandkids high and dry.
They voted to send the well paying jobs overseas, or voted to gut the Unions, allowing corporations to keep wages stagnant for the past 30 years, but the Boomer still insist that the jobs are still here and paying just as well.
Baby Boomers voted to cut funding to universities, yet continue to believe that public colleges still cost the same, relative to the median income. Average in state public university tuition in 1985, in 2019 dollars: $3,100 a year. In 2019: $10,200. CoA public university, instate, in 2019 dollars, 1985: $8,700. In 2019: $25,300.
So I respectfully ask all people who claim that Millennials do not have a more difficult time paying for college or finding jobs to actually check their facts and do their arithmetic.
I would also respectfully ask all baby Boomers not to bring “well I walked to college every day, 100 miles uphill, both ways, AFTER I chopped the wood and milked the cows, and I had $100,000 in loans after college, which I paid back in 5 years, even though my salary was only $15,000 year, while raising three kids and supporting a wife and an ex-wife” as “proof” that they had it worse than millennials do.
A personal anecdote is not data.
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One has to compare apples to apples when it comes to costs, loans, jobs.
As I said upstream, I have been splitting my time in two very different locales with 250 miles of each other. I’m sure I can replicate the situation of the other locale within an hour, likely less of each other. My suburban area has a whole different dynamic regarding college than neighborhoods not far from it. The folks living in this upscale suburb haven’t seen much change overall with after college jobs, loans, etc. Though the dollar amounts have changed, the mechanics have not. It’s not at all unusual for kids to take jobs away from this area after college. Parents generally help out in the relocation costs. That’s the situation we are in right now.
But families who are terribly strapped aren’t going to have seed money to give their kids so unless such kids get a relocation advance, that’s not going to happen. These families tend to have college kids who commuted, often worked their ways through college anyways, and not many of them look for jobs outside the area. That hasn’t changed much either.