[Alumni-chat] Alumni-chat Digest, Vol 7, Issue 18

[Travis Sanford (travissanford at msn.com)]

Depends on what you mean by financial aid. Do you mean long term debt at a low rate of interest but still enough debt to make any hope of say starting a business right out of college or buy a house, start investing for retirement etc? Then yes it can be pretty darn good. The last time I checked the maximum federally backed student loan debt that could be aquired for undergraduate education as $70K Which a poor student to Antioch could easily aquire over the course of four years.  

When I attended Antioch in the early 1990's the college essentially gave me the difference between what they calculated as my portion and what I could take on in fed debt and grants. My tuition, r&B, was 15K when I started and 17.5K when I graduated. This did not of course include travel expenses, co-op expenses, the occasional beer, calazone and movie.

I entered Antioch as a 21 year-old who had already travelled all over the world and the US and worked lucerative stints in construction. I had given most of my savings to my family to invest in their 401(k)s with the promise of it coming back out as I needed it.. That first year I got $2K in pell grants, the college calculated my share to be $6K, FWSP about $750, leaving about $7000 I had to borrow. 

I started with about $18K saved. After giving up that first $6K I spent another $6K in travel and living expenses while on Co-op that typically paid a stipend of $200 a week. 

By the time I graduated I owed about $32K at 7%. I had spent every dime I had saved from before. That $32K would have been manageable had I not got it into my brain that I needed to be a doctor which required post-bach work at an astoundingly overpriced cost from San Francisco State by the time I was actually applying to med schools I had sunk another $30K in what were billed as graduate student fees. 

So just in essentially undergraduate education I got up to $62K. Combine that with what came after ( not one but two drop outs from professional degree programs) and my debt rose to nearly $100K.

All of this was of course my doing. I choose switch my life plan around and had to go back to school to the fill the gaps, where as if I had gone directly to law school or a PhD I would not have aquired the intermediate debt from SFSU. 

Now if I had stayed in either of the professions I thought I wanted to do the debt would have been a distraction but my potential earning power would have been very good, secure and not to far off.

I went all entrepenuer though and this debt has been a gorilla on my back the whole time. If someone had just given me $100K business loan to start up I would have gotten better use of the money.

Short story long a poor kid going to an Antioch that, astoundingly, costs $34K  they could easily graduate with $50K in debt. Now considering our propensity, at least at first, for progressive and social work imagine trying to pay off $50K as a... Coordinator for a not-for-profit in SF or NYC or amywhere less expensive.

It is staggering.