[onewhippedpuppy]

Originally Posted by Porsche-O-Phile

I'm against the grain of most here. I did take student loans for my education and pretty substantial ones at that. I don't see it as a waste. I am paying them back and will one day have them paid off. That's fine. It was an investment in myself - what I'd consider an appropriate thing to take debt for. By contrast taking on debt for junkets to Hawaii, booze and cigarettes is NOT sensible as there's no long term ROI.

I don't mind paying a few hundred a month to pay for the education I got - it enabled me to gain self-respect, a good job in a field I like (where I don't have to wear my name on my shirt or say "do you want fries with that" or punch a clock or worry about my knees/back getting blown out by the time I'm 45). Those things have a lot of value and as such they're worth paying for. I may not be rich but I at least have the potential to be if I want and it's that important to me. I live okay and do fine. I can pay my bills. The biggest thing to me is having self-worth and self-respect and that comes from working to one's potential, not below it and certainly not copping out and getting a McDegree or no degree so one can go hang out with his/her high school buddies in a dead- end job while life and the world leaves them in be dust.

My point is that college is not all bad and a lot of the price is for intangibles like security, stability, regularity, quality of life, etc. I imagine hopping from one job site to the next to the next and never feeling like you "belong" anywhere professionally gets old pretty quickly. No disrespect at all to those who can or do manage to do it, just saying it's gotta be hard. I enjoy being able to be out of the office 1-2 days a week on site and have a regular place to go on the other days. I don't had to be awake at 4:00 am and I'm usually home by 6 and I'm not smelling of BO or grease or cow manure. That's pretty good to me and makes me think that the loans (and payments I make towards them) were money well spent. I (generally) like my life but realize others may have different ideals. But I'll still be working/earning when I'm in my 60s whereas someone else might be eating dog food because they three out their back 20 years earlier and have been stuck on disability since. Just sayin' - no silver bullet of one-size-fits-all formula.

I can't speak for everyone, but I never said that you shouldn't do student loans. My statement is that your major investment in yourself should have a payback at the end. I graduated from college with $45k in student loan debt and an engineering degree, which I busted ass to pay back in two years. I would do it again in a heartbeat because the payback has been significant. The problem is those who graduate with big debt and don't have the means to pay it back. You're an architect, right Jeff? That's a real degree that will get you a real job, totally worth it in my book.