$555,000 Student Loan
I just read about a woman named Michelle Bisutti who finished medical school in 2003 with about $250,000 in student loans. After deferring payments (and probably flat-out missing some along the way), various fees and penalties along with interest charges have caused the loan to balloon to $555,000. The article then goes on to talk about how Bisutti — and several other former students who are having trouble repaying — are trying to get out of their commitments somehow.
I have to say that I have no sympathy for people like this. They all admit to not reading the fine print carefully enough, while the folks on the lenders’ side (Sallie Mae, usually), claim that the repayment terms and penalties are spelled out a number of times.
To me, it seems like people are just so used to being able to walk away from big debts that they figured they could do the same to their student loans. If you’re drowning in credit card debt, you can file for bankruptcy and have the debt disappear. If you can’t make your car or mortgage payments, you simply wait for repossession or foreclosure. It seems like at least some of the people profiled in the article acted like that’s precisely what they planned to do all along — just walk away from their debt. But student loans don’t work that way.
Look, I know college tuition is expensive and goes up every single year. But people need to SHOP AROUND for tuition the same way they shop around everywhere else. It doesn’t say where Bisutti’s degree came from, but it probably wasn’t an Ivy League school if she was too dumb to read and understand the fine print. I attended community college for two years to get my Associate’s degree before transferring to a place that granted Bachelor’s degrees. Then I earned my B.A. by taking a combination of online and on-campus classes, paying an average of $200 per credit ($600 per class). And now I’m in a grad school program that costs a total of $11,000 at the University of Missouri (though the SAME program is 4x that much at a “name brand” school like USC). I will finish with $0 in student loans. Not because I’m rich, but because I’m going to schools that I can AFFORD.