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For Rockyatu Dimson, life is a juggling act in which she raises two children as a single mother, attends nursing classes during the day and studies hard at night.
Like many students around the country, she found it necessary to take out a student loan — in her case about $1,500 per semester - to help cover her annual tuition of about $12,000 at the Cochran School of Nursing at St. John's Riverside Hospital in Yonkers. She also earns extra money working 21 hours on weekends at an agency that cares for mentally retarded children.
"Debt is always on the mind of a person, especially when you are a single mom of two," Dimson said. "But I believe that after I have completed my two years here and start working as a nurse that I will be able to pay it back. The payment arrangement is pretty reasonable. It is really worth it because being a nurse is something that I am really striving for. ... I will do whatever it takes, whatever loan I have to get."
Thanks to soaring tuition costs, borrowing has become an inescapable fact of college life. Two-thirds of students at four-year colleges carried loan debt in 2004, compared with less than half in 1993, according to The Project on Student Debt.
Students nationally carried an average $19,200 in debt in 2004, twice the amount they carried a decade before.
"I would estimate that 90 percent of all college students couldn't even accurately guess how much debt they owe," said Mark Oleson, director of the office for financial success at the University of Missouri-Columbia. "Nobody bats an eye when students graduate with $20,000 in student loan debt, but everyone is concerned if a student has $5,000 in credit card debt."
Odell Gauntlett, 25, of the Bronx, has been enrolled in the nursing program for a year at the Cochran school in Yonkers. This semester, he has secured a $5,000 loan through Citibank to help cover his expenses.
"To achieve anything you want, there is going to be some sort of debt," he said. "The problem comes with your ability to repay, which is why you have to choose the career that is going to give you the ability to repay. And I believe that nursing is one of those careers."
Nursing will be a second career for Laura Lyons, 46. After years as a food services worker, the White Plains resident recently began her nursing studies at Cochran. Student loans will help pay for it.
"Being that there is a shortage of nurses, I don't anticipate having a hard time getting a job and paying the money back," Lyons said.
Education debts can add up quickly. Just ask Michael Haynes, who had many decisions to make during his freshman year at Eastern Michigan University - which classes to take, where to live, which books to buy.
Today, saddled with more than $80,000 in student loan debt, the 22-year-old senior wishes he'd spent more time deciding how to borrow.
"We're too young to grasp that this is thousands of dollars I'm going to owe," he said. "It doesn't feel like real debt until a few years down the road - like now."
Source:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com |
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