Student Debt and Buyer’s Remorse: How Grads Feel
When you’re 18 and heading off to college, student debt may seem like a far-off concern for some adult version of yourself to deal with. Four years later, it’s suddenly a major financial worry for a new grad.
That point is driven home by a couple of recent surveys of student borrowers.
The American Consumer Credit Counseling found that 57 percent of respondents did not really understand what the student loan repayment process would entail before they went to school.
Of that group, 71 percent said that if they had, they would have taken a different approach to their education—whether that meant pursuing a different line of study, picking a different school, or choosing not to attend college at all.
That dovetails with another recent survey from Rhode Island-based Citizens Financial Group, in which 77 percent of graduated student borrowers said they wished they had planned better for paying down their debt. Also in that survey, 91 percent said they felt high schools should play a bigger role in preparing students for the debt they plan to take on.
Maybe it’s an issue of education, or maybe it’s an issue of poor planning. But both surveys would suggest that the impact of college debt doesn’t really hit home for many students until, well, they aren’t students anymore.
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