Go to college to get a job. Get a job to pay for college.

[jimmyz]

[exploited]

[broken robot]

[Saz]

[exploited]

[jimmyz]

I'd love to know what percentage of the student loan money was spent on booze,clothes, drugs, food, housing, gas, utilities, pet food, girlfriend's Valentines day present, bail for a friend, car loan, rent, plane tickets to visit parents, fast food, chlamydia prescriptions, etc.?

[Indy]

[jimmyz]

[Winchester]

[exploited]

Yeah, spending money on that shit is part of the college life. You get the partying out so you can focus on a life of servitude and drudgery later. But that's a choice to be made by the student, and many people didn't make the right choices.

I'd say a solid 75% of the people I went to university with didn't have a job. They needed to "focus" on their studies, lol, which meant putting in maybe an hour a night outside of actual classes, and then partying Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. Tuition was around $9,000 a year, plus $1000 or so for books, plus $6-9,000 for living expenses. So they'd be getting nearly $20k from the government, not working, not trying especially hard, and then wondering why it didn't magically turn into a $50k a year job when they graduated.

Probably why I feel so little sympathy for those stuck with student debt. A solid 30% of the debt is just unnecessary, right off the hop. I worked a minimum wage job, which was $8.75/hour at that time. Twenty hours a week. So I was making roughly $180 a week, $360 biweekly, $720 a month. $360 for rent (lived with my future wife), the rest for food and partying, and my loan was about $5-7000 a year less than what most people took out. Had I have stayed four years, I'd have at least $20-30,000 less owed on the loan, all because I worked three six hour shifts a week.

So, needless to say, there are lots of "responsible choices" to be made.