TPM brought this up on another thread and I thought it may be important to highlight and seek additional information. How can we help our kids pay for college. My son wants to go to GT, Georgia or Clemson. My daughter wants to go to Emory. If we paid for everything (tuition, room, meals,books)it would cost 2bl or 3pl the cost of my house.
Willj responded with this advice - anyone care to contibute:
quote:
will,
Maybe you could post some info some time regarding student loans, the good, the bad, the ugly. I notice that this is not a topic that is discussed very much here.
This is something that everyone must have on their minds before recruiting begins.
Just a thought!
That's a big subject. I will be glad to provide answers to whatever questions might be posted. I work with lenders, not schools, just so you know. Perhaps you've heard of Sallie Mae or some other student loan companies. Sallie Mae is a client of mine, as are a number of other similar (but smaller) companies across the country.
I can and do answer questions about how to go about student loans. For those of you here who have kids that will need those college degrees (i.e. most of us), I will give you the one piece of information you really need....
Students do not have to qualify (credit check) for government guaranteed student loans, so any kid that goes to a real school can get loans. A student's ability to repay his student loan is based almost solely on what job he/she gets when school is over. The default rate on Stafford loans is pretty high, around 9%, and it ruins your credit as bad as a bankruptcy. The key here is that over 90% of borrowers who default do so in the first year of repayment after graduation. In fact, nearly all of these students who default fail to make a single payment on their loan(s).
There are two reasons for that...(1) he couldn't find a job after graduation, or (2) he found a job but it doesn't pay very much (I'm going to use "he", realizing that I and others also have daughters). So the biggest key for these students is planning the school/career choices before they enter college (or within the first year or two of college). And you are the only one that can give the appropriate counseling to your child, to make sure he is realistic. It's hard but you really need to talk to your child while he's doing his college planning and perhaps in the first year or two of college so he understands what the job market is like for his chosen field, and what his financial obligations will be when he graduates. It doesn't make much sense to go to a really expensive school and borrower $100,000+ then major in something that will pay you $20k per year.
The best thing you can do is provide some direction for your child based on his abilities/desire so that the borrowing matches up with the expected earnings power that he will have after school. If you have a son or daughter who has fantastic potential and desire to succeed, and he/she wants to go to Vanderbilt, for example, that's probably ok since he/she will come out with great earning power. I hate to say it this way, but not all our kids are geniuses. If you have a good, but not great student, are you really doing him a favor sending him to a really expensive school? UK, my alma mater, is pretty cheap and still a decent school. No shame in not going to Vandy or Stanford, etc.
Jon
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