Reply to $80k In Debt Worth It for Ivy Undergrad?

Forum Index » Jobs and Careers

Reply to "$80k In Debt Worth It for Ivy Undergrad?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]I'm the OP of this post:

https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/240/1032099.page

and I'm back with an update. For a TL;DR of the thread, feel free to read pages 1, 4, 17, and 18. But here's a short summary:

I have Asian immigrant tiger parents who pushed me for my entire life. My childhood was a miserable series of relentless drilling, pushing, and yelling until I achieved to their standards. Their tiger parenting worked, and I graduated high school in 2019 and got accepted to an Ivy League college with a significant amount of financial aid.

This college is an AWFUL fit for me. The intense, competitive, cutthroat, and pre-professional nature of the school as well as the college's notoriously extensive graduation requirements and lack of any sense of supportive, nurturing community (if you're familiar with the Ivies it's probably easy to guess which college I go to) made me miserable while I was at college. I was at my school for five semesters (Sept 2019 to December 2021) until I was forced involuntarily by my school to take a leave of absence this past January for suicidal ideation.

My parents consistently remind me of how worthless I am. This is because I am AWFUL at all STEM and it seems like every single remotely lucrative career requires lots of STEM. I know this is the excuse everyone gives, but I started out at my school as a Bio major with pre-med intentions and was quickly weeded out despite working very hard. I quickly pivoted to CS/Econ, but despite also working very hard, I had to drop my CS class because I was at risk of failing. I also ended up with a C in Intro to Econ despite studying a ton and regularly going to office hours (I know, I’m a pathetic failure). I'm currently in a humanities major that I feel a lot of shame about. I’ve thought about going to law school, but when I look at law school curriculums and what lawyers actually do, it seems incredibly boring.

To try to redeem myself, I applied to over 100 internships for Summer 2022. I landed an internship in Saas Sales at a FAANG company for this summer. I'm seven weeks into my internship, and I'm positively miserable. I am NOT suited to tech sales at all whatsoever, and I can't imagine any glimpse of joy for my future if I were to do this full-time after graduation.

To make things worse, my college emailed me last month saying that I "no longer qualify for need-based financial aid" since my parents' income went up recently. There is no way in hell that my parents can afford to pay the full $40k/semester for my three remaining semesters of college, so they want me to take out $80k in loans to help them pay for school.

I screamed at my parents because of this demand. $80k in loans, IMO, is an insane amount to take out for a bachelor's degree (even if the degree is from a very prestigious school). My parents want me to take out the $80k all in my name (they're willing to co-sign onto private loans after the FAFSA loans are maxxed out). I suggested to my parents that they should take out at least some of that $80k in their name through either Parent Plus Loans or a HELOC, but my parents refused (I understand why, since we were a pretty low/medium-income family until I got to high school).

I personally don't think it's worth it to take out $80k in loans to get a BA in the humanities from a school I despise so much that I was forced to take a leave of absence due to severe depression. My parents, being the Asian immigrants that they are, view a BA from an elite school as an invaluable asset to my future. I told my parents that I'd rather drop out and transfer to another school than take out $80k in loans from a college I wouldn't even want to continue attending even if it were free. My parents keep threatening to cut off all financial support for me (kick me out of the house, cut me off their phone plan and health insurance, etc.) if I don't take out the $80k to finish at my current school.

I wanted to get this board's opinion on this, since DCUM seems equally anti-student debt and very insistent on undergrad prestige. My plan right now is to resist my parents and (inevitably) get kicked out of their house since I don't want to take out this much in student loans. Ideally, in a few years (after lots of therapy), I'd transfer to a cheaper college I can fund myself -- I heard some of the Seven Sisters (ie: Wellesley, Mount Holyoke, Smith) have fully-funded scholarships for older transfer students.

I don't know. Everything seems so bleak and tiring. I'm in therapy right now, but therapy doesn't change my material conditions. I'm at a crossroads and my future seems awful.
[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics