According to this Forbes article:
1. In 2013, the average student who’d borrowed money to pay for college graduated with a debt of $28,400.
2. Many of those students were not even sure how much they were borrowing.
The average teenager who agrees to take on student loans has never had a credit card payment, auto loan, mortgage, etc. For most of them, real debt is an unfamiliar concept.
It wouldn’t be responsible for me to make broad recommendations about whether taking on debt to attend college is a good or bad idea; that’s a family decision with too many factors to cover on this blog.
But sometimes the way to find the right course of action is to analyze the potential regret if you’re wrong.
If the question is whether or not to take out a student loan to attend a particular college, you’re faced with two potential post-college regrets:
1. “I should have gone into debt and attended a more expensive college.”
2. “I should never have borrowed this much money.”
Wherever you go to college, you’ll have four years to do everything you can—to extract the maximum amount of learning, growth, and fun—to minimize the likelihood of regret #1.
Regret #2 is based on the amount you owe. And that amount is decided the minute you sign your student loan paperwork. You can still do everything you can to get the most out of college, but the amount of money that you borrowed to do it isn’t going to change.
I’m not arguing that debt is inherently bad or that every student should attend the cheapest possible college option. But for students who don’t yet know what they’ll do after college or how much they’ll be paid to do it, the less debt you take on, the more freedom you’ll have to find answers to those questions that actually make you happy.
You’ll likely never meet someone who says, “My life would be so much better if I just owed more money to more people.” So don’t let pressure, prestige, or any other factor persuade you to attend a college that’s just too expensive. Too much debt is a painful regret.