Ranking Colleges by IFII: “Irrational Financial Immolation Index”

[ucbalumnus]

@bclintonk

What is not only irrational but also cruel and unfair, IMO, is to expect to unload all that debt onto Junior, who will almost invariably have lower earnings at the outset of his or her career, and for whom the cost of servicing $100K in debt is likely to be crushing. I’d never do that to my kid, not for any undergraduate degree in any major.

We do sometimes see posts here from students who are under pressure from parents to go to the most prestigious college possible, but the parents expect the student to carry all of the cost through large amounts of debt, and would not approve of the student attending University of Automatic Full Ride Merit Scholarship. Agree that this is cruel and foolish of the parents to try to burden their kids with that much debt.

@bclintonk

Medical school and law school might be a different story. My impression is many newly minted MD’s have $100K or more in accumulated educational debt, and most seem to make it financially, though not without some penny-pinching in the early years.

The AAMC debt fact card lists a considerably higher debt level as the mean and median, and uses something like that in its examples:
https://www.aamc.org/download/152968/data/debtfactcard.pdf