Student take on growing debt loads | The Jamestown Sun | Jamestown, North Dakota:
MOORHEAD, Minn. — When Sarah Altmann received her acceptance letter from Bethany Lutheran College in 1999, she was excited to get in — and didn’t think too hard about the price tag.
“I was fresh out of high school, they accepted me, and I didn’t even think about long term,” she said. She didn’t come from money, so she paid for school primarily through loans.
More than a decade later, she’s still paying for it.
Altmann, who later transferred to Minnesota State University Moorhead and is close to finishing a degree in computer science after chipping away off and on for years, still carries about $30,000 in student loan debt. Most of it is from her time at Bethany Lutheran, a small private school in Mankato, Minn.
She doesn’t regret her time there, and doesn’t see the loans as an albatross. Instead, it’s just a persistent reality for her and a generation of college graduates who leave school carrying a heavy debt burden.
Two-thirds of four-year college graduates last year accumulated college debt, according to FinAid.org, an online financial aid resource center. Graduates in debt owed an average of $34,000 — a figure that’s more than tripled in the past two decades.
The local picture isn’t much different:
* At North Dakota State University, about 74 percent of 2011 graduates carried college debt. They owed an average of $28,689.
* At MSUM, about 68 percent of last year’s graduates owed an average of $30,036.
* At Concordia, about 79 percent of students from the 2010 graduating class — the most recent year for which data was available — owed an average of $32,271.
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GJ - This astonishes me. The greedy Synodical Conference leaders took all the Schwan loot and put it into wild hair projects, including many new glamorous buildings at schools - Concordia, St. Louis; Martin Luther College; Bethany Lutheran College. Meanwhile they saddled everyone with enormous student loan debts.
Why was nothing done to keep tuition costs reasonable?
Thrivent also pumped hundreds of millions into more projects besides.
