EduBubble writes:

After a friend told me that he financed his kid's Harvard education with a home equity loan, I started thinking a bit more about the accuracy of the number that’s supposed to represent the average size of student loans. The College Board, for instance, likes to say that the "median debt level of 2007-08 bachelor's degree recipients at private four-year institutions was $22,375". That's a pretty big number but it's so much smaller than the listed tuition price of many private colleges ($200k+) that we're lead to believe that financial aid is making it all relatively manageable.

But it isn't. I started to realize this after talking with several friends with college aged kids. Notice several things in the sentence. First, this is just the debt taken on by the "degree recipients", not parents and others. Second, it's just the "median". The college board tried to address this by doing another report on those with higher debt, reporting, "25% borrowed $35,500 or more". Again, that's not so much larger. It sounds like a manageable amount.

But it isn't the whole picture…...Continue reading Shadow Debt or Iceberg Debt? >>