Don't borrow money for school...it can hurt you and those close to you...

[sanantone]

I've already told my kids that there will be no loans of any kind. We are more than happy to pay for school and let them live at home while going to college, there are 9 CC's (yes, NINE), 2 state colleges, and a UC all within 35 miles. We will not be paying for the "college experience", but for their "education". I told them it's as easy to party and have a good time when you're a 22 year old college graduate with no debt as it is during your college years!

We are also talking about which degrees are worth the time and money to spend getting. For my friend who went to Santa Clara University to become a TEACHER! You don't need a $150k education to teach kindergarten. If you want to become a social worker because that's your calling, great, but it had better be at a CC for as many classes as you can get, and then the cheapest in-state school you can find near your parents house, because when you make $35k a year, you'd better not have spent $90k getting that degree. People just don't look at the ROI on the investment of college. If it was their 401(k) plan, they would be screaming at the HR department to get a better plan, but if it's a college degree, for some reason (for some people), all reason just flies out the window.

And as a person who was offered a partial scholarship to Stanford, with parents who said "sorry, but HELL no" to the admissions officer when she suggested that I take out loans to finance whatever they couldn't afford to pay - I'm thankful all the time for that. I ended up going to another school on scholarship and HATED college. I would have had many thousands of dollars to repay for an education I didn't get and couldn't afford.

And finally, it's the government's fault that student loan debt has gotten out of control. When student loans weren't available, people went to college they could afford to pay for. Which was most colleges. My state school was $1500/semester in 1988. Totally reasonable. Even now, at $7400/yr, it's still doable. But the reason it's gone up so much is that it's RIGHT under the amount of federal student aid available. You don't think that the $7500 federal amount being exactly what CA State schools charge is a coincidence!! If the feds decided they'd be raising it to $10k, schools would charge $9950. And if the feds said they were doing away with subsidized loans, I think costs would magically start to come down to affordable levels. The market would work, and schools would have to lower tuition to compete for students, who would be thinking whether it was worth it because the money was coming directly out of their pockets. The government screws up everything they touch, what with always forgetting to account for the law of unintended consequences.

$1500 per semester in 1988 is $3,015.70 per semester in 2015. You have to take inflation into account. That is not something that poor people can pay out of pocket. There are issues with the student loan system, but the truth is that poor people usually could not and did not attend college before financial aid was widely available. $6,000 a year is a lot of money for someone living paycheck to paycheck. In the past, it didn't really matter when it came to pay because one could get a good-paying factory job. Although, I do see an issue when working class people aren't able to become educated at the level of everyone else. That's just a way to keep the working class ignorant and unable to attain a higher socioeconomic status. These days, college degrees are needed for most good-paying jobs.

If it weren't for financial aid, I would have to join the military or try to get a job at Starbucks in order to attend school. Some people don't see a problem with this, but I do. That is basically telling poor kids that they need to take on a dangerous occupation because they were born in a situation that was no fault of their own while wealthier children can go to college with having to potentially go to war.

The $7,400 tuition doesn't look suspicious to me. There are public, 4-year colleges that range from around $4k or $5k a year to well over $10k a year. Considering that range, there are going to be colleges that fall in between without regard to financial aid amounts. The student loan limit you gave is for a third-year, dependent student. The student loan limit is lower for first and second-year students, so I don't think the college even took into consideration the student loan limit for dependent students.