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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You act like the only choices in life career-wise are crazy high stress $$$ finance, big law and medicine careers or low paying non-profit work.
The truth is that there is a whole spectrum. Finance can be a little more chill if you are at a company like PWC rather than Goldman Sachs but you can still make decent money. There are zillions of mid tier companies where work life balance is reasonable but you are not being paid 45-50 k like at a museum. Finish your degree and get a decent job. Or take a year to go into the Peace Corp and then get a decent job. There are students at Columbia who are not interested in working for Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Amazon and Google. They exist. You need to expand your social circle and get out of your bubble [/quote]

This is what I was going to say. Get a degree your parents can live with, take a high paid job for two years and pay off as much debt as you can but not necessarily all of it, and then move to a mid level paying job, like with the government or a union or university or smaller business or something. Or in a smaller city with a slower pace of life and lower cost of living. Nonprofits need IT and Finance people too. This is how you find the balance between Goldman and toiling away for peanuts at a nonprofit.

Look, I’m not obsessed with money but it matters. When you can’t pay for your dental implant after a stray ball at a softball game knocks out your tooth because you don’t have an extra $3k sitting around so you just walk around with a hole in your mouth, or when your car blows a tire and you have to replace not just the blown one but the matching one too because that’s what you have to do, so you can get to work because you have to drive because apartments near transit are too expensive or dangerous, or when you  wake up one day and realize you’d really like to have an in unit washer/dryer so you can stop hauling your laundry to the nasty basement of your building to feed quarters into the washer and having to run back down there late at night hoping that creepy dude in 310A didn’t move your underwear again, or when you have a bout of anxiety and have to pony up $275 weekly for therapy because you can’t find a therapist who takes your crap insurance, or your when your landlord jacks up your rent and you have to move and all your friends are over 30 now and won’t come move you anymore because they are adults and anyway your furniture is too heavy plus they are busy with the baby so advise you to just hire movers (and let’s not even discuss where you are getting first and last months rent plus a security deposit) or when one month you didn’t notice you had a water leak in one of your toilets so you get slammed with a water bill triple what’s normal, or when your best friend across the country’s husband dies in a motorcycle accident and you want to buy a last minute plane ticket to fly out and support her….  These things require real money. You can understand what life will be like at 25 with a low income but you can’t fathom it at 50. [/quote]

Valid, but you can do all this with a salary in a non-finance-tech-consulting-medicine-Big Law type job and a degree from a state school (as long as you have minimal student debt and live in an area without a HCOL). [/quote]

Yes, but that is not currently an option for OP. [/quote]

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