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Showing posts from June, 2009

Educational Investment, Part III: Navigating a Sea of College Debt

* I am in debt. In retrospect, my undergraduate career seems in part a veritable mission to accumulate debt. Since graduating I’ve stressed about debt, worked a couple of undesirable second jobs to repay debt, and I’ve even been known to defer debt, allowing it to simply growl beneath the bed from the back of my mind. I have nightmares where bill collectors show up at my back door with pitchforks - the only consolation being that so many of my peers are in the exact same situation. This country is teeming with twenty and thirty-somethings struggling to manage educational debt, with a long string of people in their late-teens and early-twenties prepared to join us. According to the Project on Student Debt , a nonprofit devoted to the issue, the portion of graduates in debt jumped from less than half in 1993 to over two-thirds in 2004. Factoring in inflation, debt levels for graduates rose 58% in that decade. The average public university graduate now finds him or herself owing o