@Hanna, that’s including room&board, however. Even the foreign countries that provide free or almost-free university educations don’t cover room&board. If you can’t afford room & board, commuting or CC&transfer is an option.
Some response letters to the NYTimes opinion piece:
Letters
Student Loans: Is Default Defensible?
Readers are overwhelmingly critical of a writer’s defense of his decision not to repay his loans.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/10/opinion/student-loans-is-default-defensible.html?emc=edit_tnt_20150610&nlid=17601128&tntemail0=y&_r=0
Just watched the interviews in twoinanddone’s link, and I’m impressed with Lee Siegel. Or rather impressed with what a narcissistic gasbag this guy is.
I actually agree with him on one point, which is that it’s easier to act morally when you have a lot of advantages. That’s true. Young people are a lot more likely to become muggers and drug dealers if they are poor. If I can get the things I want without stealing them, I won’t have much temptation to steal. Our choices have a lot to do with our available options, not just our ethics.
See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/11/income-based-repayment_n_3903208.html
““For federal student loans, there’s no reason why students should be defaulting …”
So true.
I get so frustrated when I try to get grads who are behind in repayment on track with their loan repayment. I do a whole campaign to try to get them to contact their servicers to get into an income based repayment plan. They just ignore my emails and letters. I call the grads I know - I promised them at their loan repayment that I would hunt them down if they didn’t repay. I am pretty successful at getting them into the plans, but then a year later … they are on my late list again because they didn’t submit their annual documentation of income & their payments reverted to the higher standard repayment. So I go through the whole thing again. I hear stories about our older grads (ones I don’t know personally), who ignore anything their servicers send because they “don’t want to deal with it.” Folks, it’s time to grow up and deal with it. Like death and taxes, you can’t get out of it. Income based plans - if you qualify - allow you to honor your commitment to repay with a payment amount that is very often affordable (sometimes it’s 0).
This has already been beaten to death in another thread.
Sorry, didn’t find this and duped the post, please remove the other.
Anyway, the thing for me is that the very first paragraph said that they “had to” take private loans from a bank. That to me invalidates the rest of it, it is never a good idea to take private loans for college, that’s a sign the college is too expensive.
We are accessing our HELOC, but the line of credit process was years ago and does not involve our son. We also can take out from the HELOC to pay off the monthly HELOC bill (yes, not sustainable forever of course, but short-term troubles can be ameliorated).
^^These private loans were 30-40 years ago when things were different, different loan programs through the government and privately. My guaranteed student loan was from a private bank, guaranteed by the government.
No one is “being saddled” - they are saddling themselves.
Hoping this gets merged with the other thread on this topic.
Hopefully this is not a duplicate thread, but not only is the article interesting and somewhat pertinent, the comments are SCATHING for the most part.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/opinion/sunday/why-i-defaulted-on-my-student-loans.html?_r=0