Within our society today, we are encouraged and expected to obtain college degrees in order to ensure a financially stable future. Attending college is now more accessible than ever before. Many minority students and students from out of state or out of the country now have a variety of options for school fee payments. Many are encouraged to apply for assistantships for graduate school, or work study for undergraduate and graduate school but applying for student loans appears to be the most commonly used form of school payment and the hardest to recover from. When involved in work study, the money you would be earning as a pay check is put towards tuition fees, and with asisstantships, you receive stipends and a fee waiver when you teach or do research for your university. Student loans are a completely different; most students who decide to accept student loans agree to repay the loan after graduation. Different loans have different criteria but I question if loan expectations are unrealistic.
Being that our economy and job market are still not where they should or could be, I feel it is unrealistic to expect for a college graduate to find a job within six to twelve months and begin paying their student loans back. Most students I know who have graduated recently have not been able to find a job within their degree program and they just take on odd jobs so they can support themselves. It’s almost as if the loans distributors anticipate new college graduates to automatically receive a corporate job position and just pay off everything they owe but it is not that easy. Research now reveals that student loan debt may be considered the next big financial hurdle begin that more people are now attending college basically for free with hopes of paying their tuition fees back after graduation. If you really think about it, someone could technically go to college for free if they used all student loans and they would just make plans to pay the money back after graduation. Students do have the option of using federal or private loans but both forms have negative aspects. For example, Federal loans tend to be more popular because a student can receive an unsubsidized federal loan with a lower rate but, good credit is definitely factored in. A negative side of private loans is the fact that some of them require a co-signer which would most likely be a parent. Now this leads to even more financial conflict because, the student’s parent may also be held liable for reimbursing the loan distributor. Overall, the high expectations of loan distributors concern me because I will be graduating this may. Although I was able to complete my undergraduate career loan free, I may have to accept a few loans for graduate school and I wouldn’t want to be stuck upon gradation. There is also common knowledge that many employers may not want to hire someone with a graduate degree because they will have to pay the person more so I hope that after I receive my master’s degree I will not be stuck in a financial bind as many are right now.