Kids Nowadays: High Loans.

The amount that kids take out in loans nowadays is just shocking.

One professor who I know from a fellowship seminar said that kids applying to the masters program in religion routinely have $70-80,000 nowadays, and that’s just from undergrad, and doesn’t include the amount that many will have to take out for that masters (like $50,000 in tuition over 2 years, and however much else they need to live on).

The worst part is because that’s now become so normal to have these huge amounts of debt, and because kids are hopeful and perhaps aren’t getting good advice from their parents, that they just don’t bat an eye at having it, or accruing more, since what’s the difference between $75,000 and $125,000?

They have beer at Starbucks now, and the other Monday when I was barhopping downtown post-class, I ended up at the flagship Starbucks having an IPA on the balcony overlooking the rich shopping district of the city, and there were a few students to each side of me, a couple (white) students to my left, and a (black) and an (Asian-American) student to my right.

The (black) (female) student was reading some book on healthcare, so I started chit-chatting with her, and it turns out that she was checking all her class books out from the main public library branch of the city to save money.

“That’s smart,” I was like.  “College is so expensive nowadays.”

And, she was going to a private Catholic school in the city, with very little scholarships, it turned out, when I asked further.

“Oooh,” I was like.  “You better watch out with that.”

“I’m hoping it’ll pay for itself,” she said.

When she found out that I was a Ph.D. student teaching, she said that she had thought of getting her Ph.D., in Anthropology.

“That’s almost impossible to do now,” I was like.  “You pretty much can’t succeed at it, and you have to have a spouse to live off of in order to teach.”

She then said that that’s what her political science professor told her.

“But you never know,” she was like.

Then I started wondering whether I should have just said “impossible” rather than “almost impossible”, and then I realized it wouldn’t have mattered, and I started thinking about how stupidly optimistic most young kids are, since they’ve been taught that if you’ve got a strong will you can accomplish anything, which just isn’t true anymore in many areas of life.