and will soon be over a TRILLION DOLLARS......
HERE'S a counter

the same counter, and more details HERE

I'm glad I'm not on this hook. The Feds don't let you bankrupt your way out.

Chuck... get him on a Fed. fire crew. He'll turn 30K a summer if he gets on a good one...

No parental help here, no loans, and wrote the final check before I graduated...

Yeah...........why would you want to accumulate debt for an education when you could just be a dumbass for free?

I never bought into the idea of $80,000 for a college education (or whatever the amount is). Room and board doesn't count in my book as you gotta pay for that anyway whether you are going to school or working or both. You don't have to have an $80,000 bill if you work part time and in the summer. I had no parental help and had to pay for my first degree but was blessed to have work pay for most of my second one.

College is gut-check time; a dose of upcoming reality. Get a job, study hard, prioritize your goals, and minimize the partying. Yeah, may not be fun, but most of life ain't fun...unless you are fishing or have a job you really enjoy.

word

Won't matter either way; I believe Chuck implied the kid was going to Wazzu.

No way does Chuck's kid go to Wazzu.

No f'n way.

That's accumulating debt and STILL being a dumbass.

No chit...even a Coog would realize that being a dumbass for free is better than paying to be one.

Fish on...

Todd

Chuck is really a closet Cougar. The Husky thing is just his cover. He is really very confused, he is a Dolphins fan, married to a Cowboys fan and his kid likes the Vikings. The whole family is a mess. I think the daughter is fairly normal though.

Adopted?

Fish on...

Todd

I think the whole thing makes sense, especially considering the economy. A bail-out here seems more beneficial that what the bank's got.

If the fed would have bailed out main street they would have paid their bills, paid off the car/truck/mortgage and little chuckies college and then the banks would have had the money, but no one would be cow-towing to them and perhaps they wouldn't feel as if they could us our money to defraud us.

FIshy

Having a College Degree does NOT cure Dumbass irregardless how much money is wasted on it.

If my kids had attended in state public schools we probably could have got it done without any student loan debt. But they attended Smith, Stanford, Wesleyan, and Cal Berkley with a lot of scholarships and grants. But they each still incurred some debt. The oldest finished grad school in 2009 and has her's paid off. The youngest acquired some more by attending grad school at Berkley, but she's got a job, so it's manageable. They both had part-time jobs while going to school so that they had a bit of spending money. Those peak $$ years at Stanford and Wesleyan were $34,000 a year, and I hear it's gone up considerably since then. As bad as the costs are, projected lifetime earnings still suggest that college is a worthwhile investment. Well maybe not at Wazzu.

Sg

A friends son got a job at the school, as an employee his classes are free. Something to look into.

How do you get a Washington State grad off your front porch??

































Pay for the Pizza.

Holy sh!t! Looks like I made the wrong decision working in a cannery. Only cleared $6-8k in two months and it made me hate fish for a long time afterwards...

Applying for grants/scholarships is definitely something I wish I did from the get-go. I think a lot of parents and students either think they're undeserving or just don't want to bother with the forms, but you might be surprised what actually shakes out...

Our dentist is in the process of building anew office and selling his old one. The dentists looking at the old one, a married couple, just graduated with $300K debt EACH. Wonder why dental costs are high?

Had a friend's daughter who was accepted at Harvard Law School. She was concerned that the debt incurred would force her to work in private practice rather than public practice.

It will be interesting to see where folks end up, and what kind of jobs, in order to pay off debt.

Our two kids where lucky. One went out of state, but got some scholarships and had enough savings/jobs to get through. The other went the private route but has gotten a series of nice scholarships and grants.

I thought the mentality of getting rich by going to law school, or becoming a doctor for that matter, was pretty much retired by the tech boom over the past 20 years. Sounds like these prospective lawyers missed the bus.

On a related topic, there was an interesting story on Frontline a few months ago about for-profit universities and their reliance on federal student loans for their students...

"And the cash cow of the for-profit education industry is the federal government. Though they enroll 10 percent of all post-secondary students, for-profit schools receive almost a quarter of federal financial aid. But Department of Education figures for 2009 show that 44 percent of the students who defaulted within three years of graduation were from for-profit schools, leading to serious questions about one of the key pillars of the profit degree college movement: that their degrees help students boost their earning power. This is a subject of increasing concern to the Obama administration, which, last month, remade the And the cash cow of the for-profit education industry is the federal government. Though they enroll 10 percent of all post-secondary students, for-profit schools receive almost a quarter of federal financial aid. But Department of Education figures for 2009 show that 44 percent of the students who defaulted within three years of graduation were from for-profit schools, leading to serious questions about one of the key pillars of the profit degree college movement: that their degrees help students boost their earning power. This is a subject of increasing concern to the Obama administration, which, last month, remade the federal student loan program, and is now proposing changes that may make it harder for the for-profit colleges to qualify.

Read more: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/view/#ixzz1bMCs4BgR

No thanks, read it twice already.