[E12] An Alternative Way to Pay for College (and Build a Competitive Career)

<p><a href="https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-statistics">Data from EducationData.org</a>:</p><ul><li>The student loan debt crisis:<ul><li>Student loan debt in the United States totals $1.71 trillion and grows 6 times faster than the nation’s economy.*</li></ul></li><li>43.2 million student borrowers are in debt by an average of $39,351 each.</li><li>15% of all American adults report they have outstanding undergraduate student debt; 7% report outstanding postgraduate student loans.</li><li>Student debt experience:<ul><li>52% of students who had taken on student loan debt did not feel it was worth it.</li></ul></li><li>Student loan payments have an annual growth rate of 6.6%.</li><li>53% of millennials have not bought a home because student loan debt either disqualified them or made it impossible to afford a mortgage.</li><li>Average Payments:<ul><li>The average student loan monthly payment: $393</li><li>The percentage of borrowers with growing loan balances: 47.5%</li><li>Just 37% of all borrowers saw their student loan balance shrink</li><li>Average repayment period of 21 years</li></ul></li></ul><p><a href="https://thestute.com/2019/10/25/not-everyone-needs-to-go-to-college/">College isn’t for everyone</a></p><ul><li>If you rewind to the 1940s, somewhere around 5% of the U.S. population had a bachelor’s degree (25 and older). Today, 35% of the U.S. population aged 25 and over has a college diploma. Over that time, the population has more than doubled. So the number of college-educated Americans has ballooned from 6 million to something like 110 million people.</li><li>The graduate degree is really the new college degree...but even that is fairly commonplace in many industries. (And costs even more to secure another degree.)</li><li>I’m not telling anyone not to go to college, but I would think very carefully about going into massive debt just to secure a degree that no longer sets you apart. And, unfortunately, the old way of paying your way through college doesn’t work. (Waiting tables, part-time wor