Let’s pretend four college graduates land engineering jobs and starting salaries of $60K a year, but each leave college with varying amounts of student loan debt. In this episode we do the math and analyze quality of life for each of these students right after graduation and decades later, and the results are staggering.

In light of the current college scandals, this episode invites parents to reflect on their own expectations of their children and how they may be pushing their own agendas in unhealthy ways.

What factors contributed to the nation's student loan crisis? Here we investigate the interplay between government regulation, the rising price of tuition, and personal choice and how it's brought us to this critical point in our history.

What if your family has money for you to attend college but instead of paying for school they invest it in the S&P? You'd be surprised by the returns we uncover in this episode.

How do you get through college without debt if you have no financial support from your family? In this episode we talk about options for students facing this challenge.

Just how much does it matter where you attend college? We examine several factors in assessing importance of school choice and discuss the recent Pew research on life satisfaction after college, which may be surprising.

Parents of students in college are taking on more and more debt for their children and it's crushing their retirement dreams. In this episode we address the importance of honest conversations about family finances, the value proposition of a college education, and other ways for students to pursue their dreams.

Here we address creative ways to mitigate the pain of student loan debt if you're finished with college or have already taken on debt.

Is it possible to get a college degree without going into debt if you don't have any scholarships? In this episode we talk about four possible student scenarios and one where you can actually graduate from university without taking out student loans but instead leave with money in your pocket.

Continuing our student loan series, we invite you to ask yourself if college is the right choice for you, especially if you're not sure of what you want to study. We also look at different types of intelligences, fields that don't require a degree, and the importance of finding a mentor in your field of interest.

In this student loan series, we do the Real Math and calculate just how much a student will have to work and how long it will take a to repay their loans into adulthood. We use a real life example and then offer some easy ways to hack the college system and save at least a third of the cost.

In this third episode of our student loan series, we discuss the importance of being honest about family finances with your child, the implications of student loan debt throughout one's life, and the value of responsibility for young adults.

In this second episode of our student loan series, we invite you to change your perspective on the value of a college education, especially considering out of state tuition costs, the true cost of loan repayment, and entry level salaries.

In this first episode of our student loan series, we dive into how this system is set up against you. We examine some common myths about the value of a college education, how the student loan system works under a skewed version of true capitalism, and how universities are incentivized to sell students a dream.

Prelude to the Problems: I am not against college. However, I do question the value for many families of spending over $120,000 for anyone to get a college degree. There must be a cost benefit analysis done before entering school and there should be considerable financial education required before tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of loans are issued to someone who cannot smoke or drink legally and whose brain is not finished developing.

After completing the prior podcast and discussing with the community, it became very apparent that not all parents can afford to help their children through college.  Many parents struggle to pay rent and keep food on the table and often times families can lose housing benefits when a child turns 18, so for many families providing room and board for the student isn’t possible, even though I’ve yet to meet a parent that doesn’t want to help. 

This week’s news from the WSJ tells us that students at historically black colleges (see The Student-Debt Crisis Hits Hardest at Historically Black Colleges) are graduating with disproportionately more debt than other students, who are also graduating with record levels of debt. 

When it comes to the student loan debt crisis, let’s not leave out the responsibilities of parents, many of whom are not acting like the adults in the room.