New Tool Helps Students Predict Their Student Loan Debt
The cost of college is up a whopping 439 percent since 1982, and the average student graduates with $25,000 in loans. Given that college graduates earn more than their high school peers, that might not seem like a bad investment, but if a graduate can't find a job that pays enough to meet the monthly student loan bill, that degree can start to feel like a burden. For current high school seniors pondering college acceptance letters, calculating how much they could owe in student loans after graduating from a particular school is a smart move to make.
As part of the recently launched Know Before You Owe project, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Department of Education have developed a new interactive cost comparison tool to help students evaluate the costs and risks involved in paying for school. The tool, which is still in beta, lets students enter up to three schools they're interested in and whether they're going for an associate's degree or a bachelor's degree.
Here's how it works: a prospective student enters the University of California at Berkeley as an in-state student, the University of Michigan as an out-of-state student, and private Northwestern University. The tool then gathers