Kelli Space is 23 and living at home with mom and dad, trying to pay off the $200,000 in student loan debt she racked up getting a Sociology degree from Northeastern University. If you are keeping score at home, her payments are $900 a month until 2011, when they increase to $1600 a month for the next 20 years.
Holy Frack!
This raises several questions in my mind. Keep in mind that I am the father of a future history major. I’m not disparaging sociology majors. The world needs sociologists, and historians. However, you simply can not spend $200K of borrowed money to get a sociology degree. The ROI simply is not there.
What was she thinking? I understand that she is the first person in her family to go to college. However, the fact that she borrowed all $200K implies that her family makes enough that she was not eligible for Pell Grants. So these are middle class folk that should have some financial sense.
She is from NY. There are probably 100 perfectly fine Universities in NY where she could have gotten a sociology degree for 1/2 the cost. Northeastern may be in Boston, but it is no Harvard. Harvard isn’t worth Harvard money IMO.
What the heck is the school doing letting a student rack up $200K in debt chasing a sociology undergraduate degree?
I know why the banks loaned her the cash. It’s risk free. The government guarantees the loans, so the banks don’t care.
Is there any institution in this country that actually works? Education, health care, you name it. They are all FUBARed.
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Now, now Chris…how else do you expect the lending institutions in this country to rack up hefty profits that can stimulate the economy and possibly maybe someday trickle down to the rest of us?
When I read stories like this, I have a hard time working up a lot of sympathy. I think people should be smart enough and responsible enough to know what they’re getting into. Well, I still have a little sympathy. Here’s why.
Once upon a time, I was an English major and History minor. You know the drill: Spelling Bee champ, and big on reading and writing. I’m the kind of person that can walk into the History section at Borders and Barnes & Noble and get so engrossed in those books that I forget what time it is.
When I was a first semester freshman, and older grad student saw what was happening– or, you could say he saw my future more clearly than I did at the time. While walking across campus, he asked me what I thought was an innocuous question about whether I wanted to teach the college students of the future. I replied that I didn’t. He asked me if I wanted to go to J-school. I said, “get real.” He stopped and said, “Daniel, who do you think is going to be jumping up and down to hire someone with an English degree?”
I was stunned. I actually had never thought it all the way through. After all, my parents were footing most of the bill, and college girls were a lot of fun. Over the next hour, he clued me in on the realities of grad student life and the world of the teaching assistant. At the end of my freshman year, I had decided to stay, but I never again recaptured that dewy-eyed innocence and naivete of the student who thinks the world is his oyster. That was the late ’80′s.
I can’t imagine what I would be thinking if I were in college now. Our system is severely broken and it is going to require a gigantic paradigm shift for our country to reverse our failures, particularly in mathematics and the sciences. I routinely encounter college students who cannot read or write with precision. In terms of science education, we can’t even keep up with some third-world countries. Rearranging the deck chairs on the proverbial Titanic won’t do, it’s going to require a thorough housecleaning. Teachers will have to do the unpleasant task of teaching again instead of hiding in their enclaves of research.
I’m not totally depressed though. This could be the beginning of a revolution, but there’s gonna be pain first. When I see projects like Khan Academy and the Edupunk book, I’m excited for the future.
I’m speechless.
Totally unsurprised. My guess is she borrowed money to live off of. I mean, loans are free money, right?
Somebody at Metafilter looked into it and figured out that tuition, room and board at Northeastern would run about $45K a year. So it doesn’t look like she was living it up too much on her loans.
Stanley Fish today: “College costs, the sequel.”
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/22/college-costs-the-sequel/
Unsurprisingly for someone writing for the NYT, he doesn’t think government money makes college more expensive. HEH.
Crazy.
I guess this is what happens when all through high school it is reinforced at every turn that you must go to college immediately after graduating high school in order to be successful. We end up with this generation of kids who are in debt up to their eyeballs to get a $30K/yr job – and still have to get a mortgage for a house!
“…and still have to get a mortgage for a house!”
That’s why the newest trend I’m seeing for wedding gifts from one or both sets of parents is a down payment on the house.
You upper middle class people are so cute — a down payment on a house for a wedding gift? Just adorable.
If you are poor, you have the good sense to live in sin and get married if children are planned (if then) and do it on the cheap in somebody’s backyard and, guess what, you are just as married without throwing away that money. Which, if you have a little, is enough to qualify for the FHA loan and if you don’t you keep saving a little here and there but never ever just piss it away on some large party some magazine said you need.
Thank goodness we will qualify for Pell grants when my daughter gets to college age. She is aiming at psychology now, which I imagine is as useless as any other social science degree when it comes to paying loans back. Of course, that’s assuming there is such a thing as a Pell grant and other financial aid by then.
The person to blame is the Federal government for backing student loans. That means you and I and every other American taxpayer are the co-signers for these loans. There is no way a private financial institution would make such ridiculous loans without the government backing.
This is the same reason we had the housing bubble. Look at the government.
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