By Laura Goode, Aug 25, 2009 3:02 PM
Editor’s note: In our continuing investigation into the status of student loans and the young graduates they burden, the EthnoBlog’s Edwin Okong’o sat down for some straight talking about money management and the cost of education with one such debtor, Patrick Cushing. Pat is a product manager for Wikinvest, a startup web/finance enterprise in San Francisco, and graduated from Columbia University in 2006.
EthnoBlog: So we’re here to talk about the great American dream that begins when you get student loans.
Patrick Cushing: Oh, that dream? All right. You don’t have to start paying off your loans until you graduate. And so the way that, at least in my case, it worked for a school like Columbia, is they determine what your parents make and they say, you know, this is what your parents can afford. And then for everything else they’ll offer up some sort of assistance whether it’s a grant or some sort of loan program.
I think the key though is that where they offer up what your parents can afford is usually a far cry from what they can actually afford. So it’s kind of like the hidden loans, I think, a lot of times. And these are things that are taken out in my parents’ name but there’s sort of an agreement between them and me that I would take on the loans as soon as I graduate. So I think those are the loans that are probably the biggest issue for me.
