Many NYU grads graduate with massive debt

If you think that graduate school will help you dig out of the hole of debt from your undergraduate degree, think again. And don't think of NYU as a solution.

Two key excerpts, starting with the lead:

Five months after Kassandra Jones earned her master’s in public health from New York University in May 2019, she still hadn’t landed a job in the field. She was staring down a six-figure student-loan balance and had to pay for rent and food.

So she sold her eggs. Again.

Ms. Jones first harvested her eggs before starting at NYU in 2017 to help pay for moving to the city, she said. She received a $12,500 annual scholarship and relied on $131,000 in federal loans to cover the rest of her tuition and expenses. She has given her eggs five times, including to an NYU fertility clinic, earning $50,000.

Now 28 years old, Ms. Jones is working freelance on public-health campaigns for nonprofits making about $1,500 a month, which isn’t covering her living expenses, she said. She is applying for new jobs and considering leaving the field. “There are definitely moments where that number just looms as this tunnel that doesn’t have a light at the end of it,” she said of her debt. “It feels like I’m kind of trapped.”

That feeling is familiar to many recent alumni of NYU, which has an ignominious distinction. By many measures, it is the worst or among the worst schools for leaving families and graduate students drowning in debt. Many of its graduate-school alumni earn low salaries, despite their expensive degrees.

* * * * *

A Wall Street Journal investigation has detailed how some of the nation’s wealthiest schools rely on the easy money of Plus loans. Some have capitalized on their brand-name cachet to expand pricey graduate programs and increase tuition costs, turning the programs into cash cows while leaving students in low-paying fields to take on six-figure debt. Plus loans have become the fastest-growing segment of federal student debt and a particular burden on low-income families.

NYU Is Top-Ranked—In Loans That Alumni and Parents Struggle to Repay - WSJ.pdf

Download PDF • 7.39MB

Here is one finding:

For NYU’s graduate students, the university’s advanced degrees often don’t pay off". In 40 out of 49 programs, NYU graduate students who took out federal loans borrowed more than they earned two years out of school. By that measure, NYU had more graduate programs with high debt loads than any other U.S. university with published data. The debt and earnings figures are medians for 2015 and 2016 graduates, the most recent data from the Education Department.

It's a cautionary tale. Look before you leap. I expect that CS and MBA have better payoffs. In either case, they still are very expensive. Not having to borrow money to attend actually might make things look better than without borrowing. You have to look at pre-degree salary, full costs of earning the degree, and (if full time) lost wages earning the degree, and then consider all of these against what the 'new' salary would be. E.g., If you are making $120k, spend $200k for the degree, and lose two years ($240k) of wages, you need to recover $340k pretty quickly with added salary to make the degree worthwhile. If you do it part-time and still spend $200k, your earnings still need to increase by $200k over your previous salary to make this worthwhile, even if it means five years post grad at $160k just to break even.

The Journal has been publishing a series of articles (see below) on the massive negative economic proposition of many colleges, majors and undergraduate and graduate degrees. The simplest advice is to look for the least expensive route to be certified in a STEM field, be it an associate, baccalaureate, or graduate degree, or even an external certification or license in a technical field, e.g., MicroSoft certifications, NOT hairdressing. There are plenty of low-cost or free online opportunities to learn to code, the new foreign language, the 21st century lingua franca.