WBEZ | student loans

Parents put off retirement to pay for kids' college

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 15:51:00 -0500

Patty Halajian is a seamstress in Lake Zurich, Ill. Mostly she sews costumes for local theater shows. She’s never been rich, but always made ends meet.

Halajian has two daughters. Her husband died of a heart attack right before their oldest daughter graduated high school. When it came time to pick a college, her daughter was still mourning. So when she got in to Butler university, everyone was relieved to have some good news.

But her daughter's student loans couldn’t cover the cost. So Halajian borrowed $14,000.

“I mean you’ve nurtured them their whole life," Halajian said. "They get to the goal line it’s finally they are going to graduate from H.S. and go to a great college. And you know if you do this for them they are going to have a great life. You do it. You just do it.”

The loan Halajian took out is called a PLUS loan. Nearly a million parents took out these loans last year. On average, they borrowed $12,000.

The loan is federally distributed, but has higher interest than a student loan: 7.9 percent.

Parents can borrow an enormous amount of money--up to the full amount of tuition--with no regard to for income or other debts. So it’s easy to get in over your head.

Often these decisions are the last hoop to jump through to get to college. The decision is fast. And often no one is there to explain the consequences.

“I didn’t understand it all," Halajian said. "I was adrift at sea.”

Jason Delisle is the director of the Federal Education Budget Project, a non-partisan organization that provides research on education spending.

“I call it predatory lending," Delisle said. "You got someone in a vulnerable situation. They don’t want to say no. You just sign on the dotted line"

PLUS loans were put in place to help poor and working class kids go to college. Student aid advocates have pushed for a long time to make loans simpler and easier to get. But now advocates say these PLUS loans may be hurting the people they intended to help.

“These are essentially sub prime loans," Delisle said. "Only it’s not the government that’s being predatory, it’s the institution of higher learning."

AARP recently examined data on people between age 50 and 65. They don’t know exactly how many of them had PLUS loans, but one in 10 still had some sort of education debt. The average amount was just over $28,000.

That education debt is nearly impossible to erase through bankruptcy, and can be garnished from social security payments. PLUS loans can't be turned over to the student, making a parent responsible until it's paid off.

That’s forcing some parents like Halijian to put off retirement. She is 60 and still working as a seamstress. She owes $8,000 dollars on a PLUS loan and will likely still be making payments into her 70s or 80s.

“I am just going to sew until I can’t sew anymore,” she said.

She never expects to retire, but Halijian doesn’t regret taking out the loan.

“I’d do it again," she said. "If she needed college I would have walked through fire for her.”

Explore PLUS loans in Illinois
(Data via Chronicle for Higher Education)

What's a liberal arts degree worth nowadays?

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 13:47:00 -0500

Doomsayers be damned: America’s higher-education model, and its price tag, ain’t broke. So says Northwestern University President Morton Schapiro. In a recent op-ed for the L.A. Times, Schapiro and Lewis & Clark College President Barry Glassner argue that the college premium — the ratio of college earnings to high school earnings — justifies the investment in higher education. Individuals with a college degree now make almost 85 percent more over a lifetime than those with only a high school diploma.

But statistics are tricky — while one economist opts to focus on the long-term returns, another is focused on the immediate future, which, for many recent college graduates, is bleak. More than 50 percent of bachelor’s degree-holders under the age of 25 were jobless or underemployed in the last year. So if and when a college graduate gets a job, he’s likely to earn, on average, $20,000 more annually than a person with a high school diploma. But when the average student is graduating with $25,000 in student-loan debt, he or she might be a bit more focused on getting a paycheck, any paycheck.

This might explain why, as Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder is quick to point out, there are 80,000 bartenders and 115,000 janitors with bachelor’s degrees.

It's true, some majors pay more than others. PayScale did a salary survey of the top college majors that lead to high salaries. You won’t find liberal arts in the top 10 below — the classic course of study is about 75 down from the top of the list.

Best Undergrad College Degrees By Salary

Methodology
Annual pay for Bachelors graduates without higher degrees. Typical starting graduates have 2 years of experience; mid-career have 15 years. See full methodology for more.

The median starting salary for a liberal arts major is just under $38,000. And the mid-career average is just over $63,000 — so is a liberal arts education worth it? President Schapiro and Professor Vedder help provide a cost-benefit analysis on Afternoon Shift.

So what do you think: What’s the value of a liberal arts education? Call (312) 923-9239 or join the conversation on Twitter at #AfternoonShift.

‘Nothing is Free’: College students and their debt

Wed, 23 May 2012 08:08:00 -0500

A few months ago, my dad sent me an email.

“RE: loans - i hope you understand your loans,” he wrote. The body of the email consisted only of a Bloomberg article titled, “Student Borrowers Lack Understanding of Loan Terms, Study Shows.” I didn’t respond to his email (I know, I know) and here’s why: I don’t really understand my loans. In fact, I was on the phone with my university’s financial aid office just the other day talking about consolidating my student loans, Perkins and Stafford, subsidized and non. The counselor was trying to explain to me when I would have to begin making payments when I interrupted her to ask, “To whom?”

While my dad will likely be aghast upon hearing this story, New York Times correspondent Andrew Martin would not be surprised. Martin is the one of the lead authors of Degrees of Debt, an ongoing Times series about student loans and the debt load graduates are left with afterward. Most students have around $23,000 – about what I have – but it’s easy to find students with between $40,000 and $50,000 in debt, Martin says. Fully two-thirds of today’s undergraduates borrowed money in order to afford their education, but Martin says he still found plenty who feel like no one warned them about what they were getting themselves into.

The question is, who is supposed to be responsible for making sure students understand what they’re signing? My dad, who pays my tuition and guided me through the loan process, is in finance, so I assumed it was his job. Not once did I stop and think about what I would actually owe when I graduated.

When it comes to figuring out how we ended up with $1 trillion in outstanding student loans, Martin points a finger at the marketers. Universities are raising tuition costs much faster than wages are increasing and states are spending less on students, but its the loan providers – the banks and the federal government – that intentionally make student loans seem high on benefit and low on risk. “For-profits get beaten up for their marketing, but public schools aren’t that different,” Martin told WBEZ. “The idea that no one pays the sticker price has become a slogan for marketers.”

My dad, who loves to haggle, would be among the first to tell you that some people do end up paying the asking price.

When the housing market crashed in 2007, many people were angry with homeowners who took out loans they knew they couldn’t afford to keep up with. For their ignorant risk-taking, the entire global economy would suffer. As with the mortgage crisis, some are unsympathetic to students who say they can’t afford to repay their loans.

Martin, however, is cautious about a comparison of student debt and homeowner debt on the national level. The majority of student loans are held by the government, so they could never have the domino effect that mortgages did. Martin does say, however, that the scenarios are similar in that credit was easily available – maybe too easily – to people who were being told by marketers that the loans were low risk.

When the next Degrees of Debt installment comes out, myself and my fellow graduates will be six weeks closer to the day when we have to start writing checks. When the day comes, some of us will defer the payments due to unemployment, others will get loan forgiveness through government programs, and the lucky ones with jobs will begin making payments.

Most of my peers, though, aren’t resentful. “As many economists and many parents say,” Martin writes, “the only thing worse than graduating with lots of debt is not going to college at all."

Caroline O'Donovan is the Eight Forty-Eight intern. She graduates from the University of Chicago in June.

The Student Loan Crisis as Seen by the Guy who Hangs Out on Campus but Doesn’t Actually Go There

Fri, 18 May 2012 10:45:00 -0500

"If you're worried about student loan debt, what it means for graduating seniors and for the future of our nation, congratulations. That means you're paying attention," wrote Adam Levin on ABC.com on Sunday.

Performer Chris Hauser is more than paying attention: he's satirizing the situation at The Paper Machete. Read an excerpt below or listen above.

Good day to you ladies…bros…
I’m here unofficially on behalf of my fellow students. I’m not technically a student but I consider myself a Student of Life. You could say that I have a degree in Teasing the Mind – an associates in Listening to the Moon – and an Externship in Awesome… and I was in jail for 2 ½ years, but that’s neither here nor there. You may have seen me around campus. Any given campus – I go to them all. You can catch me at UIC every morning at 6:45 in front of the TBH asking for change. Then I make my way over to Columbia to see if any of the film students need a leading man (they never do). Lunchtime, I wrap my shirt around my neck and play pan flute by the Richardson Library. Then I end the day at Northwestern, just…dreaming…and asking for change. But Fridays, I shake things up. Around three in the afternoon I visit high school parking lots and ask if anyone needs a ride. I don’t have a car, it’s just a little joke I play – the perfect preamble to asking for change.
Starting to get the picture? I’m with the students. I know their minds. Sure, maybe I don’t sit in a classroom and listen to the man tell me what’s going on out there in the world. That’s because the world is my classroom. The birds are my teachers. The flowers are my textbooks. The streets are my hallways. So you tell I who’s educated.
You can imagine then that I have a very particular insight into the financial woes of the common student. And I don’t like it. University used to be fun, man. No one worried about money or “The Future.” No one cared what the interest rate of a subsidized loan was. It used to be about drinking strawberry wine and reading each other passages from “The Naked Ape” and discovering ones’ sexuality in the back seat of a policeman’s cruiser at the tip of a baton. I remember the first time I secretly followed a group of fraternity brothers to the Dean’s lodgings. Those Phi Beta Kappa boys covered his front door with maple syrup swastikas and dingleberries and I laughed so hard that all my clothes fell off and I collapsed into the Dean’s bed and went to sleep.
It’s not like that anymore. The eyes of the academic are hungry, not for randy escapades, but for financial security. Let me lay it out for you. How much debt do you have to get yourself into so you have the skills you need to get a job that compensates you well enough to pay off said debt? That’s a fundamental query. How do you suppress an erection while you hand out paper mache figurines of yourself during freshman orientation? You just can’t know until you’re in the midst of it. I pity their plight.

The Paper Machete is a weekly live magazine at the Horseshoe in North Center. It's always at 3 p.m., it's always on Saturday, and it's always free. Get all your The Paper Machete Radio Magazine needs filled here, or download the podcast from iTunes here.