Posted on 01/15/2009 10:10:48 AM PST by rabscuttle385
Higher education can be a financial disaster. Especially with the return on degrees down and student loan sharks on the prowl.
BY KATHY KRISTOF
As steadily as ivy creeps up the walls of its well-groomed campuses, the education industrial complex has cultivated the image of college as a sure-fire path to a life of social and economic privilege.
Joel Kellum says he's living proof that the claim is a lie. A 40-year-old Los Angeles resident, Kellum did everything he was supposed to do to get ahead in life. He worked hard as a high schooler, got into the University of Virginia and graduated with a bachelor's degree in history.
Accepted into the California Western School of Law, a private San Diego institution, Kellum couldn't swing the $36,000 in annual tuition with financial aid and part-time work. So he did what friends and professors said was the smart move and took out $60,000 in student loans.
Kellum's law school sweetheart, Jennifer Coultas, did much the same. By the time they graduated in 1995, the couple was $194,000 in debt. They eventually married and each landed a six-figure job. Yet even with Kellum moonlighting, they had to scrounge to come up with $145,000 in loan payments. With interest accruing at up to 12% a year, that whittled away only $21,000 in principal. Their remaining bill: $173,000 and counting.
Kellum and Coultas divorced last year. Each cites their struggle with law school debt as a major source of stress on their marriage. "Two people with this much debt just shouldn't be together," Kellum says.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Never had a student loan in my life. My husband didn’t either. We worked part time, at times. Or one was working full time while the other went to school full time.
My son will graduated next year without a loan. We started saving when he was young. He did part of his college years in a state school and he works part time.
I work in a field (engineering) that typically requires an extensive education involving difficult subjects. My best employees are the ones who paid their way through "marginal" schools -- often taking 6-7 years even just to finish an undergraduate degree.
I'll take these folks over their counterparts with expensive Ivy League educations any day.
This just blows me away...supposedly intelligent people submerging in debt for worthless sheepskins. They should have bought old cars, or stamps, or gold bars. At least there would be something of value to sell off. I bet they expected this all to be guaranteed to pay back.
The real trouble here is the failure of the school system to give kids any inkling of personal finance training, which could at least prepare them to make better decisions about debt. My two didn’t get it either...
I have to say that I value a good, honest auto mechanic, plumber, HVAC technician or house painter as much as I do a good, honest accountant or lawyer. And to be candid I believe that one is just as difficult to find as the other and all of them are worth the money when you need them. Skilled and honest tradesmen are real assets to a community and I would have no problem at all encouraging my son or any young person to seek training in a needed trade. A lot of these tradesmen make good money and given the relative glut of degreed individuals in certain sectors make more than many who have submitted themselves to “higher education” in a lot of cases.
>>Beyond the fact that he received a BA that guarantees you’ll need to go to grad school unless you want to teach HS for peanuts,
Can you even do that, any more? I think you now in many cases have to be an Education College graduate to teach in the schools.
Articles like this make me so happy I walked out of college with only one ~$7000 loan to pay back...
Los Angeles has more lawyers than all of Japan. Some of them make a good living suing each other.
If they had gone to some small burgh, they would be writing wills and doing bankruptcy filings for relative peanuts.
We need to get you out of there. That area, including San Diego, is beautiful, but you are taxed and expensed to heck.
Please look elsewhere for work and get around more conservative people. Even if you moved toward Yuba City, you’d live cheaper. However, I’d strongly suggest moving to another state.
Find one with more conservative guys. Maybe the southeastern US would be where you should look...
We had furter discussions.
My Economics degree comes in very handy. I can logically and correctly explain the theory behind my unemployment.
A degree in history (with a heavy load of English lit,) is the best prep for law school you can have. If this guy had law school in mind when he was an undergrad he was doing the right thing. As can be seen by the nice job he landed after passing the bar exam!
Keep in mind that when you both make a six figure income that the government lives off one of them, so you are already living off just one yourself. Additionally, you make too much money to deduct any of that school debt.
That said, yea, they should have just increased their standard of living marginally after taking the jobs and paid off the debt in four years time.
12% a year? Since when are educational loans 12% a year? Something doesn’t sound right here.
I must be doing well...HS graduate and 36,400 income!
When it comes to paying off debts: YES!
Regards,
BS. Let's assume with both making 6 figures, they are clearing $12k a month (rough estimate, depends on state, etc - that and "6 figures" is very broad, so I am estimating from the low end, i.e. $200k per year, pre-tax). The student loan payments with 12% interest (as quoted in the article) would be around $2.9k a month over a 10 year term, or $2.3k a month over a 14.5 years. If they cannot live off $9k a month, they are mind-numbingly stupid.
IMO a History Degree would be worthwhile except that Most History depts have become post modern shitte-holes. The problem is the extreme bias of most of the History/Social Studies academia. The Universities are ripe for change...they are tottering as their investments have cratered and the Cost/Benefit equation has come into focus.
Sounds to me like this whiny-assed idiot may have “worked hard” in high school but didn’t learn anything about BUSINESS. He sure didn’t create a very good BUSINESS PLAN about financing his life goals.
No, what you really have here is back-biting about a frustrated sense of entitlement. Yeah, hey, I went to college and law school. Where’s my big house? Where’s my Lexus?
Me Me Me. Sounds like a little choir girl.
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