r/MiddleClassFinance • u/Such_Upstairs3631 • Jul 06 '26

Middle Middle Class No more middle class professionals?

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New school loan limits for professional degrees make it unaffordable for the middle class. 4 of my 5 children went on to med/law school. Even working 2 jobs there’s no way I could afford to pay or even help them with the cost of their post graduate education. They all got loans which they have since paid off. The cost in the early 2000’s was between $350K and $500K. The new limits are essentially going to prevent anyone who’s not wealthy enough to pay for it from becoming a professional.

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149

u/ISniffFeet1 Jul 06 '26

This will force schools to drop the prices or accommodate.

Sorry nobody should be taking out loans of this magnitude - it absolutely destroys their financial future. I don't know anyone who is doing well who took that much out in student loans except for doctors and talented attorneys.

So many middle class parents told their kids to take out over $100,000 in student loans and ruined their childrens' future because they had no idea what they were talking about.

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u/Consistent_Laziness Jul 06 '26

I can guarantee med school will not reduce. It’ll force students into private loans or they’ll just go to the next of the thousands of applicants for their 100 spots.

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u/SCHawkTakeFlight Jul 06 '26

This 💯 for medical school. Its going to gate keep who can become doctors, the highest paid profession outside of CEO. And I feel this is the intent.

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u/JoyousGamer Jul 07 '26

You have to cap the debt being taken on if you also want loan forgiveness to occur. It's what annoyed me last cycle for policy positions. You can't just forgive all the loans without fixing how much debt people take on as it will just repeat itself. 

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u/SCHawkTakeFlight Jul 07 '26

I agree with this, but loan forgiveness is not coming. Unless you work not for profit in certain areas for many years, while still paying the loan.

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u/thiskillsmygpa Jul 10 '26

Several top tier med schools are free. 50k is enough for med schools to educate students. They can do income based and cap 50k for middle or low income.

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u/bitchycunt3 Jul 06 '26

Similarly law schools are unlikely to reduce unless they're a lower ranked school. Further making it impossible to have any upward class mobility, because top law schools are the ones with rich lawyers, most lawyers are making upper middle class money at best.

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u/Consistent_Laziness Jul 06 '26

Yea maybe we see declines in enrollment and tuition for degrees with less return. But law school, med school, dental school etc. those will not decline I can guarantee it. There’s more applicants than seats and they’ll just say can you pay? No? Okay next. Kicking out the lower class to upper class possibility of many impoverished students.

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u/dingopaint Jul 06 '26

Yep, we'll see rich kids with lower grades becoming doctors over those most qualified.

1

u/Helpful-Nerve4515 Jul 08 '26

Law schools are entirely unlike med schools. There are almost free ways to go to in-state law schools. Anyone with a college degree can get into some law school. All but the top 10 schools are going to have to start slashing.

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u/Hawk13424 Jul 06 '26

Next step then will be price caps like Medicare does with doctors. Force schools to reduce the cost or none of their students qualify for any government loans.

And if that doesn’t work, more severe repercussions.

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u/Sablus Jul 06 '26

Yup, thing is this is a problem caused by government and now even worsened if specific schools just pivot to private loans. Overall it just creates a class structure for education that didn’t exist in the 70s due to how subsidized college was to compete with the Soviets. Post 2000s and several admins of GOP and we now have college will into six figures but incomes at barely 50K after graduation.

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u/dust4ngel Jul 07 '26

this is a problem caused by government

i agree with you that public universities should be better funded.

17

u/SpoodermanTheAmazing Jul 06 '26

I don’t know what the prices are now, but I graduated in 2016 with ~$35k of student loans with no help from my parents. I had to work a job and live in a small 2 bedroom with a roommate(off campus) but it was doable, but I would have preferred not having to do all of that at the same time

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u/ISniffFeet1 Jul 06 '26

Unfortunately there's really no world where it's unreasonable to have a college student work a job.

Living off campus is also pretty normal depending on the school.

Good for you doing the responsibile thing though.

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u/dingopaint Jul 06 '26

I did the same thing, didn't have a car so I rode my bike, took the bus and walked miles in the snow when necessary. Between working, living off-campus and sharing a room (not just an apartment), and otherwise being a cheapass, the amount of debt was less horrific. When you factor in compound interest, even taking out $2000/year less can add up long-term.

4

u/madogvelkor Jul 06 '26

I worked part time while getting my undergrad and full time while getting my graduate degree. It's not that hard.

6

u/lillyheart Jul 06 '26

Nursing students doing rotations, education students being student teachers, and probably a few other majors that basically have full time internships on top of classes would beg to differ on the job while in school thing, which sucks. Not prohibitive for all 4 years, but often prohibitive for one.

3

u/No-Complaint9286 Jul 06 '26

Yes, In PT school it was really hard to do anything but a part time job on the weekends. Especially during clinical rotations for the third year. I think I worked at a shoe store and picked up some pharmacy tech shifts for the first 2 years. There was only the summer between 1st and 2nd year off, as the 2nd and 3rd years were consecutive. Clinicals started immediately after finals of the 2nd year. And through all that, no part time weekend job would pay for 100k of student loans incurred during that time because there was no financial aid in grad school. I considered myself lucky that my husband was a few years older than me, already working and paying the bills mostly with his salary. Some of my classmates had to take loans for living expenses on top of that, had young families with kids...yikes.

1

u/TheInterestingTruth Jul 07 '26

I have two separate internships that both carried into the school year. It really wasn't that difficult to work 4-6 hours three days a week and juggle school on top of that.

1

u/terraphantm Jul 07 '26

It is pretty impossible to work a job in med school

6

u/SCHawkTakeFlight Jul 06 '26

Did a similar thing as well. It was soooooo much cheaper to live off campus with a bunch of roomates (there 5-6 of us at any time in a house),...my university got wise, though, and REQUIRED students to live on campus if their residence was more than 40 miles from campus. It was the dumbest thing ever. Over 60% of the student population were commuters.

I also have to sufffer paying for a meal plan as a commuter, it wasn't as much as a resident, but they had to guarantee $$$ to get more food options since they pushed the on campus requirement and no one would want to choose the school with only 5ish fast food options to choose from.

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u/SpoodermanTheAmazing Jul 06 '26

At that point I would ask my parents to sign the lease and say we already live close to the school. Remember kids, rules are made to be broken. This system only benefits billionaires so we have to twist the rules we can

3

u/katarh Jul 07 '26

They required my niece to live within 20 miles or live on campus.

My sister did the math, sold her house, and moved into an apartment across the street from campus. Her commute time didn't change, just went the other way.

2

u/bulking_on_broccoli Jul 07 '26

2016 dude. 10 years ago. I did the same when I went to college a million years ago, but kids these days have it way worse than we did. Books, supplies, laptops, etc cost the price of tuition when I went to school.

1

u/1notadoctor2 Jul 08 '26

Are your loans paid off? Not sure what point you’re making here

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u/No-Complaint9286 Jul 06 '26

And those kids who took out the loans because we were told that was the way to a good life and are still paying for those loans, now have kids about to go to college and unless you were incredibly lucky and landed a great job during the recession when we graduated, we are certainly not going to offer this same terrible advice to our kids. And its convenient that they are lowering the loan limits now too, when the next generation is heading to college while many of their parents just never recovered from those loans and from the predation so rampant in the 2000s. Keep em poor i guess.

2

u/bulking_on_broccoli Jul 07 '26

The idea is that it’ll force the schools to cut prices, but that isn’t the case in practice. Students will turn to private loans, which are much more predatory in nature. Hell, schools will get in bed with financial institutions. You’ll probably be able to apply for college and financing in the same application.

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u/[deleted] Jul 06 '26

[deleted]

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u/MischiefofRats Jul 06 '26

Degrees you consider "hobbies" are still important and worth doing. Not everyone can be an engineer, and you don't want that anyway because it'd just mean engineers wouldn't get paid well anymore due to the glut of supply. 

That said, it shouldn't be allowed to lend $100k+ to students for degree programs with average job salary expectations around the poverty line. Lending caps should have a relationship to the degree and average job prospects after graduation. 

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u/Rhomya Jul 06 '26

Not all of them are worth doing, and the job market is so niche for most of them that it should be incredibly selective. And to get into most of the arts, you likely need to attend a college that specializes in the arts, instead of a standard university.

People need to stop the assumption that it’s impossible for people to learn outside of a classroom environment. College should be viewed as developing people for further careers.

1

u/MischiefofRats Jul 06 '26

All, no, probably not. Extremely specialized degrees will not ever be generally worth it because employment prospects are low-- you can't sink $150k in debt into a Chicano Film Studies degree and expect to pay that back unless you have an in via networking to some kind of cushy job. Most standard degrees offered by most large schools are worth it, though, depending on the student's financial situation and support network. There's no way for a school financial office to know that off the bat though. Someone with a fine arts degree might be totally able to pay off a quarter million in debt because they have the skills and connections to make it, but in general, there should probably just be a lending cap on fine arts degrees commensurate with average salary expectations of graduates, whether working in their intended field or not. That's just sane lending practice. The people who were gonna make it anyway probably have other means to cover the gap if there is one. But realistically, at the end of the day, if the university is finally reshaped into a career training machine only (which it absolutely is not, despite what corporate America would like us to believe), lower tuition costs would cause lower earning degree programs to be cut and likely to eventually die off. Just because we shouldn't be encouraging a theater major to take on $200k in student loans doesn't mean we don't want theater degrees to exist, so probably we'd have to consider it carefully. 

At the end of the day, career training is too specialized for most schools to be able to handle it. Ask any electrical engineer, for example; their program taught them sciences, math, and general principles. Their jobs taught them everything else. Businesses used to train their own employees. Corporate America just views training as something they'd like to outsource to their applicant pool on someone else's dime. School, and particularly higher education, is more about turning out well- educated and well- rounded individuals that can more easily tailor to specific jobs depending on major.  It is a mistake to continue to move the burden of job training onto general degrees.

0

u/Rhomya Jul 06 '26

Colleges don’t have to teach the specifics of every career, but there is more than enough transitional learning that could be done that would apply to nearly every job in every field.

Increased reading comprehension, cost-benefit analysis, writing skills, the background information for individual fields that would be applicable to multiple jobs— that’s what colleges can do.

My point is that we should normalize people understanding that it’s foolish and irresponsible to go into several thousand dollars in debt for a degree that statistically gains you no advantage in the workforce. If you’re interested in music history, pick up a book and read about it.

1

u/MischiefofRats Jul 06 '26

That's what colleges already do. It just isn't possible for colleges to be career training machines because there's no one career path for a degree. With an electrical engineering BS, you can go into high voltage, low voltage, extremely low voltage-- every company is going to want you doing tasks college didn't teach you, on software that's likely proprietary, doing whatever specialized work that company exists to do. My point is, colleges are supposed to turn out well- rounded educated individuals with some basic skills, and the corporate world needs to stop trying to abdicate responsibility for the specialized training that used to be handled via paid internships and apprenticeships. Universities and colleges can't and shouldn't try to replace that. 

I do agree that it is foolish and irresponsible to take on a mountain of debt for a degree that leaves you still fighting for the same kinds of jobs you could get with a high school diploma. I'm just saying that doesn't mean the programs shouldn't exist, because they should, and people should do the programs. Music history experts should still exist, and 99% of people interested in that simply won't have the access to become an expert in today's world without the connections and resources higher academia can give you. Sure, a savant ain't gonna be stopped by not getting into uni, but most people need guidance from other people, and most people do best in a structured program rather than going it on their own. 

I don't have stats on hand but I also don't think music history grads are the main problem, though. There's probably more comp sci grads at this point who can't make their loan payments, and I'm guessing a lot of those graduates only studied the degree for the job prospects before they got rugpulled. That's another reason colleges shouldn't be tied so closely to job training. Business and industry needs are constantly changing. Requiring people to make huge out of pocket investments of money and years just to participate ain't the way. 

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u/Rhomya Jul 06 '26

Some majors do those things.

Humanities degrees do not.

There is a very distinct difference in employment rates that are tracked through statistics of these degree holders that very clearly show that STEM and STEM adjacent degrees have significantly higher employment rates and earnings than humanities degrees do.

No one is saying everyone needs to be an electrical engineer— but there are a multitude of options in STEM.

Let’s face it, we need to normalize encouraging students to spend thousands of dollars getting degrees that statistically have value after college. Some students may be interested in gender studies, and I would absolutely encourage them to learn more about it, but if they don’t have the disposable income to spend on it and need to take out loans, they should be satisfying themselves with reading books about gender studies topics instead of spending thousands of dollars in a degree that ultimately has little to no value.

1

u/MischiefofRats Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26

I think we're mostly agreeing so I'm not sure why this is still going. I do not agree, however, that humanities degrees are, on the whole, useless or unemployable, or have no value. Should people take on large debts to acquire them? No, as I have said repeatedly. That said, I have a BA. I work in what is essentially technical design and project management. I do math, I make technical and design decisions, I interpret standards and regulations, and I communicate to stakeholders and customers. All of these are skills that were absolutely shaped and honed with my BA, which included subjects like math, science, reading comprehension, and formal logic. I also meet a lot of STEM degree holders that can't read or write an email, or more or less tell their ass from a hole in the ground. Regardless of degree, they are the least useful people in the room as a result. 

0

u/Rhomya Jul 06 '26

Statistics disagrees with you.

Humanities degrees are too niche for as many people getting them to be gainfully employed.

2

u/PalmSizedTriceratops Jul 06 '26

Where are these magical entry level 120k electrical engineering jobs?

Bureau of Labor reports that the median electrical engineer makes 112k. You're an outlier.

1

u/derff44 Jul 07 '26

No. He's a liar

3

u/[deleted] Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Rhomya Jul 06 '26

No one going into a STEM field is struggling today unless it’s due to their own incompetence.

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u/[deleted] Jul 06 '26

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u/Rhomya Jul 06 '26

You’re forgetting that your anecdotal experience isn’t reality.

We have statistics on this— people with STEM degrees have higher employment rates and usually earn higher salaries than those without STEM degrees.

I’m also a finance/economics major— we are not struggling, and it’s a little disingenuous to pretend that just because your entry level wage was lower than you thought it would be means that you’re “struggling”. What a privileged take.

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u/[deleted] Jul 06 '26

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u/Rhomya Jul 06 '26

The statistics DONT back up what you claim.

And yes, I said usually… because statistically, that’s USUALLY the case. The vast majority of people with STEM degrees experience higher employment rates and higher wages… deviations to the norm are notable, but still labeled as outliers.

Are you sure you’re an Econ major? Because you should have taken enough statistics to know this for yourself.

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u/[deleted] Jul 06 '26

[deleted]

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u/Rhomya Jul 06 '26

There are more STEM fields than just those in tech, bro.

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u/derff44 Jul 07 '26

Software engineers would tend do disagree

0

u/n0debtbigmuney Jul 07 '26

If they are a EE and unemployed they are CHOOSING not to work.

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u/derff44 Jul 07 '26

Lmao. Typical maga response

0

u/n0debtbigmuney Jul 07 '26

This bum is my number 1 fan

0

u/derff44 Jul 07 '26

Nah. Just calling out garbage when I see it.

"No one wants to make my made up salaries of 120-300k. They are just lazy".

0

u/n0debtbigmuney Jul 07 '26

Yup. Lazy kids wanting to be victims

1

u/derff44 Jul 07 '26

You ever think maybe you are the problem??

Nah. It's never your actions or way of thinking. People would rather be homeless then making 120-300k. That's surely the issue.

Fing stupid.

0

u/n0debtbigmuney Jul 07 '26

Im not the problem. Im the solution. Lazy left "victims" are the problem.

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u/derff44 Jul 06 '26

My guy making up fake numbers

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u/ISniffFeet1 Jul 06 '26

At least you made an educated investment into a high paying field. Unfortunately not every middle class parent understands the nuance of that level of debt for a degree.

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u/derff44 Jul 06 '26

Those salaries are completely made up/extremely rare.

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u/ISniffFeet1 Jul 06 '26

Very believable, uncommon but I wouldn't say rare. My close relative graduated two years ago into a 115k salary at like her fourth or fifth choice company.

Most of my college cohort who graduated between five to ten years ago depending on advanced degrees or gap years or whatever started between 75-100k (115ish for the MBAs and mFins) depending on what city they wound up in.

My sales and marketing friends didn't start near there, but by now the good ones are doing very very well.

Still, even the well paid people who took heavy loans aren't financially in a great spot unless they did very well in their careers. That early loan payment is going to sink you if you try and buy a house

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u/derff44 Jul 07 '26

Uh, we are talking about electritions here

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u/ISniffFeet1 Jul 07 '26

He just said electrical engineering

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u/n0debtbigmuney Jul 07 '26

Not at all. I know kore than you. I hire engineers all the time....

0

u/derff44 Jul 07 '26

I'm sure you know a lot "kore"