Student loan burden reaches record - average $25,250 for 2010 grads

[Liberal_in_LA]

Student loan burden continues to grow: study

College students who graduated in the spring of 2010 launched into the worst job market in recent history with bigger student loan debts than ever before, an advocacy organization reported.

The Project on Student Debt reported Thursday that those students who had loans owed an average of $25,250, up 5 percent from the previous year. The unemployment rate for new college graduates was 9.1 percent.

The new data adds weight to the argument that education debt is a growing problem for new and recent graduates, with some experts estimating that total education debt is now pushing $1 trillion. President Barack Obama announced some measures designed to make those debts easier to repay, but his plan only applies to federal loans, and not those issued by private banks.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/03/us-usa-student-loans-idUSTRE7A24HI20111103

[HockeyMom]

1. I went back to college in 1996

Not a 4 year college, but community college. My loan was for $4,000. I have long since paid that off. What would 2 more years have been back then at a local, commuting state university?

[exboyfil]

2. I came out with $7,400 in 1985

I paid it off in less than five years. Other than home mortgage it is the last debt that I have had. The best $7400 ever borrowed. With it and scholarships I got an engineering degree from Purdue.

My oldest is a 10th grader. I have been socking money away in a 529 to at least cover her tuition. I am blessed and thankful everyday for my job and education. It is getting so much harder for the current generation. Very good students from even lower middle class are getting little help beyond the subsidized state university education. With room and board and other expenses, you are at $84K for four years (engineering is another $5K on top of that) at our state universities.

[customerserviceguy]

3. Name anything else

that a person with little, no, or bad credit could get a loan for, without any demonstrated means of paying back that loan, and is completely uncollateralized?

Ok, there were those "liar loans" for the Flip-That-House crowd a few years ago, but we saw how that ended up.

What if every student loan were backed up by at least a cursory examination of the possibility of the student eventually getting a JOB with that education, so it could have a snowball's chance in hell of being paid back?

[exboyfil]

4. You could probably get to this point

by excluding programs with high default rates.

[customerserviceguy]

5. That's not a bad start

How about evaluating programs of study at all institutions? Engineering or nursing might be OK pretty much everywhere, whereas subjects that only prepare you to teach them to other people might be suspect.