

25% of Students Say College Loans Have Impacted Their Career Choices - chermor
http://bostinnovation.com/2011/06/25/tuition-debt-impacts-25-of-students-career-choices/

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mattvot
What's the average tuition fee in a typical US college/university year?

The UK was about £3300, now under roughly £7000.

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daniel-cussen
Like 50,000 USD. About £31300.

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leyfa
_"Private nonprofit four-year colleges charge, on average, $27,293 per year in
tuition and fees"_ [1]

And that's just the private schools. The public schools are considerably
cheaper: ~8k USD for in-state students and ~12k for external students. 50k USD
is the full prize for the top private schools like Stanford or the Ivy League.
Imagine how expensive some schools would have to be for the average to come
out at 50k USD.

[1]: <http://www.collegeboard.com/student/pay/add-it-up/4494.html>

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chezral
Would be interesting to see a study focused on student debt and decision
making around founding a startup or diving into entrepreneurship. On the one
hand, those who graduate without a lot of loans would be financially enabled
to dive into e'ship. On the other hand, loans might actually influence and be
a driving factor for recent graduates who couldn't land jobs to create their
own businesses.

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shareme
but that is micro-business formation where there debt load is not a penalty
due to the low costs of setting up a micro-business, vastly different from a
start-up where debt load is a penalty factor

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molecularbutter
Graduating with enormous debt forces a lot of kids into jobs they don't want,
assuming they can get hired at all.

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itswindy
I honestly thought about this, back then when stock market had 'predictable
returns.' Imagine $100K ($25k X4) in a retirement account for 40 years.

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ianterrell
At 6% APR after 40 years it would be over $1 MM.

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arethuza
Discount that $1M with 40 years of inflation to give some idea of what the
purchasing power might be and it doesn't look _quite_ so impressive.

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ianterrell
Let's use historical data instead of back of the envelope guesswork.

Over the last 40 years (1970-2010) the average S&P 500 return has been 11.61%,
while inflation has been 4.4%. Past performance not necessarily but usually
predicting future performance, but, with those rates...

Over the next 40 years $100k would grow to $8.1 MM in future bucks, or $1.45
MM in 2011 dollars.

<http://www.moneychimp.com/features/market_cagr.htm> for returns,
[http://www.moneychimp.com/articles/econ/inflation_calculator...](http://www.moneychimp.com/articles/econ/inflation_calculator.htm)
for inflation, and <http://apps.finra.org/Calcs/1/Savings> for savings
calculations.

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arethuza
Somehow I don't expect the next 40 years to look a lot like the last 40 years.

