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<p>I’m in a similar position though I chose to work a couple of years before starting my grad program.</p>
<p>However, for a tippy top grad program, I would say that level of debt can easily be worth it (though I may be biased since I’m looking at around $100K (at least) for my grad degree, in loans). I would sit down and look at</p>
<p>1) How much (if any) debt you’re carrying from undergrad
2) What the average debt is for program grads
3) What the median salary of grads from the program (and how you’d expect to stack up in the median, ie, if you’ve have comparably less real world experience than the rest of the class, your interests lie in a nonprofit sector or something similarly lower-paying, etc)
4) Any debt-forgiveness programs the school offers
5) How long it takes program grads (on average) to repay their debt (the financial services office should have this info)</p>
<p>Plug your expected loans into a loan calculator and see around how much you’d be paying depending when you want to get those loans paid off by. Think hard about what your expected salary would be, and whether you could carry those loans - typically with a Harvard or similar professional degree, students can. Commit yourself to the fact that you’ll have to live a lower-key lifestyle until the loans are paid off and don’t take out loans for stupid stuff (a friend at HLS used some of his loan money to do a $10k Carribean vacation - my guess is that it’s not going to be worth it in five years when he’s paying it back). But six figures of debt can easily be worth it for a top tier law, business or med program.</p>
<p>ETA: watsonfan, I found my relatively well-paying, high-responsibility and intellectually challenging first job out of college on Craigslist! No one discriminated against my undergrad (to my face, anyway) though plenty of people hadn’t heard of it. That’s okay, because luckily I was able to explain concretely what skills it had equipped me with that would serve me well in their organization. I didn’t hear a lot on jobs, like I said, until May, and then in the two weeks before graduation, I had five job offers. Who knew? Seriously, plenty of companies aren’t looking to hire you until you can actually work for them.</p>
<p>I had plenty of friends who had luck on Monster.com, Craigslist, LACN, or by researching companies they were interested in, picking the “careers” page, and looking to see if there were any openings.</p>