Reply to Looking back, do you wish your child attended the least expensive college?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It's pretty cringy when people throw around Cost of Attendance to exaggerate costs. Unless you're super rich you're not paying $85,000 a year for UChicago, nor are middle class people taking out "six figures" of loans for their child's undergrad. Most financial aid students at flagship state schools leave with $30k or so in loans. That's frankly not a big deal -- unless your kid flunks out. I believe the starting median salary for a bachelor's is now around $60k (?), so an average kid can easily pay off $30k in loans living at home for a year after graduation. Or even faster if they get an engineering degree or any other path that leads to a six-figure starting salary ex. nursing, tech, finance, or consulting.[/quote]

There are such things as Parent Plus and private loans that allow you to take out more than that, and plenty families do.[/quote]

Define plenty. I don't think it's that common for parents to take out loans, is it? For undergrad. When schools and College Scorecard report median loan sums of graduates, wouldn't the Parent Plus loans be factored in that as well? So the median is still about $30k for public U, right?[/quote]

For NYU, USC, Pitt and Penn State, it is very common to take out thousands in PPLs or private loans. Pitt’s average student debt is $40k+[/quote]

My wife works at Pitt and teaches and advises many students who have loans. Quite a few are middle class OOS students, from NY or NC or NJ, etc. who wanted to go farther away. My college-age niece was aghast when she heard that one of the students "didn't like UNC Chapel Hill enough" and took out loans to go to Pitt. Most of these kids aren't taking out anywhere near $100K but substantial debt does seem avoidable in some instances for these solid HS students who had more affordable options. Pitt's a great school but I'm not sure it's worth it to go into debt over Rutgers. (Family friend who is a Pitt prof has a DS 22 who was not admitted to Pitt, so they are forking over the money to send him to Illinois.)[/quote]

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