DDL on 22/6/2009 at 17:06

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I'm still wondering if the "100K loan for college" was a typo or not.

$100,000?!?!?

How long are you intending to stay? Or is this normal for the states, or something?

Starrfall on 22/6/2009 at 17:23

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That's incredibly and depressingly normal for the states, as far as cost goes. The amount of actual debt will vary depending on what the individual student's circumstances are (ie rich kids usually don't have to take out student loans)

Starrfall on 23/6/2009 at 02:38

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Four years, probably. Here's what my undergrad school (high quality public research university) is currently projecting as far as cost of attendance: (http://www.finaid.ucsb.edu/Budget.asp?Level=Undergraduate&Budget=URF3&Year=2009)

Here's my law school, which is 3 years: (http://www.law.ucdavis.edu/current/financial-aid/cost-of-attendance.html) (the extra fun part about law school right now is that the majority of students do NOT make the big bucks and in this climate everyone who even managed to get any job at all is thanking their lucky stars oh god I'm going to go on a massive rant any second now)

Thank fuck I should be all done with school for good!

Starrfall on 23/6/2009 at 13:58

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Nope, $1500 a year for books and supplies is about right for most people. It's especially bad for first years, because the big "Intro to X" books are 1) big and 2) usually packaged with some useless crap and 3) get a new edition every goddamn year so you usually need to get the new ones, which means they can end up costing $150 bucks for one book that you'll use for ten weeks and then can't sell back because you can't repackage the stuff and oops they're coming out with a new edition anyways.

For me because I was in humanities it eased up once I got into the upper classes because those classes usually used smaller paperbacks and even if not it was much easier to find used ones, but I don't think I ever managed to spend less than $200 a quarter on books/materials in undergrad. (And there are 3 quarters in the regular school year there.) Law school is just as bad, if not worse, looking at about $600 a semester. The price of textbooks and the particular ways students get screwed on them is a big source of complaints around here.

That 6k for rent will get you nine months of a shared bedroom in the most amazingly beautiful slum on the west coast.

For other stuff (food) they may be overestimating some, but those budgets are only for nine months. If you look at an entire year, you're definitely spending at least that much and almost certainly more.

The really fucked up part is HOW this has happened (and this may be somewhat unique to CA). The UC's used to be one of the best (if not THE best) public university deals in the country. You got a well-regarded, high quality education for a price that really every single in-state student could afford if they wanted to, and if they ended up with some loan debt it wasn't going to ruin their lives. Guess how much total fees were at UCSB for the 01-02 school year? (my second year there, can't find info for the first year)

They're $9077/year now. In 01-02, they were $1433/year. I'm reasonably certain the educational quality has not increased by a factor of six in that time.

The law school estimates now are $12,000 more than they were when I started 3 years ago, and cost of living is NOT the primary cause of the increase (for example, in that time our rent increased exactly 50 bucks a month) - it's the fees.

In the meantime, the UC Regents, who run the show, have given themselves raises pretty much every year. So it's not "just" the cost (for california's public universities at least), it's the massive non-stop unlubed ass-fucking the students have been getting for the last decade. And it shows no sign of slowing, because our economy is in the shitter.*

So I'm not joking when I say thank fuck I'm out. I'm also lucky in that working as a tutor (fee breaks) and being a smartypants (academic scholarships) let me get out of law school with only $80k in debt.

Here's the evil genius of continuing to raise student fees for CA universities (or any university, really): as long as the schools keep increasing their cost estimates, students will be able to get loans for those amounts. In other words, the size of the loan you are permitted to take out is determined by your school. So the schools will simply certify more loans.
Now as above our economy is in the shitter and the state budget is a disaster. One solution? Just raise fees at the universities! The students won't be able to afford it, but they can just take out student loans. We'll tell the students its for updating facilities or something to pretend there's an actual reason for the increase aside from "we'd like more money". The UC system has 160,000 undergrads. If we raise their fees by a thousand bucks we'd make a free $160 million in just one year!
Most loan money does not come from the state, it comes from the federal government as government loans, or it comes from private companies as private loans. So the state gets ALL THIS MONEY from out of state sources, which is good! The state needed more money and now it's getting some it doesn't have to pay for! (Because again, while costs are increasing at a ridiculous rate, the services the students get are not.) The student will pay it back FOR the state! Fucking awesome!

aguywhoplaysthief on 23/6/2009 at 15:58

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Starry: I'm not sure that the cost increases for public colleges is some sort of money grubbing conspiracy. They can't just spend the extra money on prostitutes, they have to (I would assume, since they are public) spend the money on teachers, facilities, and other costs.

The other thing is private schools; there are a lot of them, and their costs are rising very quickly as well, and they don't have board of regents. They have to compete on price with other colleges.

All I'm getting at is there has to be some reason for the increases in college tuition, although what it is I can't be sure.

DDL: My friend (who is in much debt) told me that you can't go bankrupt with student debt, and after a cursory intarwebs check, that does appear to be the case.