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College Tuition Growth Rate Is Biggest Bubble of Them All
Tweet Share on Facebook September 28, 2011 Comment (8)Have you ever asked your mirror how student loan debt stacks up to the recently popped housing bubble that helped drive the Great Recession? Probably not, unless you have a Snow White mirror on your wall.
But if you are curious, Moody's Analytics has the answer: The rate of growth in tuition far exceeded real estate appreciation even during the housing bubble. That's just one of the interesting nuggets in "Student Lending's Failing Grade," a new report in which the staid agency warns that "[f]ears of a bubble in educational spending are not without merit."
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College Degrees Requiring More Student Debt
Tweet Share on Facebook September 21, 2011 Comment (1)Debt to Degree: A New Way of Measuring College Success, a report released in early August by Education Sector, attempts to provide students choosing colleges and policymakers with a single measure of value that combines debt and graduation. The report creates a "borrowing to credential ratio" for colleges by measuring the total amount of money borrowed by undergraduates and dividing that sum by the total number of degrees awarded. In short, it determines for each college how much student debt is taken on for each degree issued.
[For information on debt and loans, see U.S. News's Paying for College guide.]
This borrowing to credential ratio is Education Sector's attempt to assess the impact of two disturbing trends. First, barely half of the students who start college get a degree within six years. Second, as regular readers of this blog know well, educational debt is now greater than credit card debt and is closing in fast on $1 trillion.
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Enjoy College Without Spiraling Debt
Tweet Share on Facebook September 14, 2011 Comment (2)School is now in full swing for many college students and it's going to be a great year; everyone's moved in, classes have started, and the fun has begun!
The Student Loan Ranger has put together some steps you can take to manage your educational funds while in school. So, before making plans for tomorrow night, take a little time to make sure you're starting out on the right foot and making choices that will ensure your debt is manageable after you graduate.
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The Student Loan Ranger's Mailbag Express: The Real World
Tweet Share on Facebook September 7, 2011 CommentWe spend quite a bit of time on this blog trying to convey the impact educational debt can have on your life after graduation. In one post, "Take Another Look at Student Debt Consequences," we even made up a couple of fictional future college students to personalize the issue. In this edition of the Mailbag Express (for those who are wondering, yes, it was inspired by the Pony Express), we want to share the real-world stories of people who are struggling to repay their student loans.
