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.
'via Blog this'
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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.
8 comments:
Well, the high prices are just evidence of government tampering in the market...and the natural human tendency to bite at the bait of moral hazard. College prices across the country, secular or religious, private or public universities all spiked and continued an upward trajectory when the Federal Government began guaranteeing Student Loans. Even if certain Institutions sincerely wanted to keep student costs down, how could they afford decent professors if every other college, with inflated rates, could afford to pay their professors higher salaries? It's just supply and demand.
Some colleges, I grant you, are worse than others, particularly the Lutheran Seminaries. But if you want to see tuitions drop through the floor then get the Government out of Students Loans, and education in general.
You are correct, Marcia. Government intervention, welcomed by all schools, has led to the student loan bubble.
Schools have no motivation to control costs. However, this is no excuse for making church worker education as expensive as going to Yale Divinity.
Marcia Luther just created the blogger account to comment on your post since her profile only had 2 views by the time I looked at it. Ichabod has that effect on people that they feel they have to create new anonymous accounts to comment here. :)
A lot of IDs are brand new when I see the post. You and I were the two who looked at the profile. That was funny.
This happens almost every day. I get nasty, gratuitous comments from Appleton - new ID, new date.
Marcia had something worthwhile to say.
The 30% who get through college and seminary with no debt must come from families with only one or two children, I'd reckon.
Concordia Moorhead was the college mentioned in the article. Fargo/Moorhead community!(one big town really) Three colleges abound. When those kids get thirsty, they do not head for the water and the koolade.
Oops, I left out West Fargo. Yes, West Fargo is a separate town with its own mayor. The area WELS church is located in WF.
In Christ,
Rebecca
This is the fifth most popular post on Ichabod a week after posting. That must mean every last person in the ELS has read it by now. :)
Related post showing that building projects do tend to add to tuition costs since money is fungible. Even when the building's cost is covered by a gift, often its heating and cooling and maintenance are not. Also, the number of staff and student workers and security guards increase when a new building is built and none are torn down. This is similar to how presidential libraries added to the public debt until a law said that any such library had to be endowed with enough money to make it revenue neutral to the govt in the long run:
Bethany Spends $17 Million on Honsey Hall, May 22, 2011:
http://ichabodthegloryhasdeparted.blogspot.com/2011/05/bethany-spends-17-million-on-honsey.html
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