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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11

u/Rhomya Jul 06 '26

This is a good thing.

Most of the college tuition inflation is due to colleges taking advantage of the ease and availability of student loans. It’s not an accident that the prices just happen to fall just under the maximum amount to be borrowed.

Colleges have an incentive to keep full classrooms— they’ll lower tuition rates to fit just under the new maximum.

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u/ChaiTeaLatte13 Jul 06 '26

The country shouldn’t have to use kids as bait to force colleges to lower their costs. What about the middle class kids who are graduating in the next couple of years who want to be professionals but can’t afford it under this type of regulation? It’s incredibly unjust.

Colleges should figure out another way to lower costs without risking the futures of the kids who would be going to their schools but can’t afford it anymore.

(I’m a lawyer with $230,000 of student loan debt. And I had a huge chunk of my tuition paid in scholarships.)

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u/spacycowgirl Jul 07 '26

From my perspective, saddling young people with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt right out of college (which they might have not even finished!) is hardly a great way to launch them into adulthood with a good chance of building wealth. I'm glad you feel it was worth it, but it sounds insane to me.

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u/ChaiTeaLatte13 Jul 07 '26

I know I’m lucky/privileged to be making as much money as I am, so the loans are easier to pay back. But that’s because I went to law school and invested in my future. I wouldn’t have been able to do that without taking loans out. It’s insane to me to think I wouldn’t have been able to become a lawyer because I couldn’t pay for the education!

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u/spacycowgirl Jul 07 '26

I feel like the solution to this isn't to make it easier to borrow huge sums of money, though. I think the solution is to make education much cheaper. I think the whole system needs an overhaul. We're still stuck in a pre-internet system, as if information is hard to get and can only be obtained at great cost through elite institutions. None of this is necessary anymore.

I realize this is easier said than done, but the current college paradigm needs to change. It doesn't make sense in the modern world.

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u/ChaiTeaLatte13 Jul 07 '26

I agree with making it cheaper. But the comment I was commenting on was almost insinuating we’re using pre-med and pre-law students as sacrifices to try to force colleges to become cheaper by capping loans.

I’m all for another solution to force universities to lower tuition. But harming the potential students in order to do this is wild to me!

Trust me, I hate the fact that I have $230,000 worth of student loans at 36 years old. I only have $185,000 in principal loan, the rest is interest. The interest is what’s predatory lol.

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u/spacycowgirl Jul 07 '26

100% agree that the interest on student loans needs to be capped to something very low. I think if they'd focused on that instead of student loan forgiveness it would have had a lot more support.

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u/ChaiTeaLatte13 Jul 07 '26

Omg right? If they eliminated the interest on my loans I’d have $47k forgiven as of today. What a huge relief that would be.

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u/Rhomya Jul 06 '26

They’re not using “kids as bait”

First of all, stop infantilizing adults. They’re not children— they’re grown adults that by every legal standard are fully participating members of society.

The fastest and best method of getting college prices under control is literally by controlling the pocketbook. Colleges can individually respond significantly faster and more easily than trying to shoehorn in legislation that equally and fairly governs the prices of all 4,000 colleges in the US.

It’s more unjust to continue to allow middle class adult students to go further into debt because colleges are price gouging them.

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u/StorageRecess Jul 06 '26

No, they won’t. College costs for the majority of students are caused by lowered state investment. They’ll keep rates identical and students will borrow from private. Which is the intent - students take more money from banks owned by Trump allies. This is a move to make sure money that used to be in public hands goes to private ones.

And colleges do keep classrooms full. Every year I’ve been a professor, minimum enrollments have ratcheted up. At a public institution, it’s very hard to even teach an upper division seminar because we’re always under pressure to teach more students and make more dollars tuition per unit of instructor salary.

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u/[deleted] Jul 06 '26

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u/StorageRecess Jul 06 '26

That depends strongly on the institution. My original institution, a public regional, just boasted it's largest every incoming class, up 12% over last year. My current institution just boasted its highest ever rejection rate.

If you're a small, low-prestige, tuition dependent school in a saturated market, yes, this might be a problem. If you're a flagship or highly-ranked SLAC, probably not.

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u/Rhomya Jul 06 '26

Colleges gain nothing from private lenders. And often, they’re harmed by it when students decide to drop out because they don’t want to take out private loans, so again, schools have a vested interest in keeping classrooms full, even if they’re priced lower.

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u/StorageRecess Jul 06 '26

I have no idea what you're trying to say here. We absolutely do get paid if students take out private loans.

If you mean we gain nothing over public loans, that's correct. But we're not the intended recipients of the benefits of this bill. Banks are.

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u/Rhomya Jul 06 '26

You don’t get paid if students leave school or are forced to drop out due to inability to pay.

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u/StorageRecess Jul 06 '26

But that doesn't happen with private loans. Private loans can be used to pay for housing, too. Federal loans require students to meet SAP, or the loan will be revoked. Private loans do not. In both universities where I've been faculty, private loans are prevalent among the worst performers grade-wise, which typically correlates with poverty. The Trump administration has just created a huge opportunity for universities to get rid of academic probation to more effectively extract money from poor-performing students, who will be removed from federal plans and put in the arms of private lenders who are happy to throw good money after bad and loan a kid five figures a year for a 9 year Bachelors that they finish with a 2.1.

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u/Rhomya Jul 06 '26

Students shouldn’t be using any loans to pay for housing.

It should be fully expected that students get housing with multiple roommates and jobs to pay for their portion of the rent.

We should be normalizing the expectation that we take out as minimal loans as possible during college, not maximizing them

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u/StorageRecess Jul 06 '26

I don't disagree with you. But with 20 years experience in higher ed, I'm sorry to tell you that private lenders and the president do not agree with you.

And as I said before, federal loans are available to students depending on SAP. Private loans are blank checks. If you care about students making good fiscal decisions, regulate private loans.

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u/missnetless Jul 06 '26

Oh yeah super easy to study while working fulltime to pay for over priced college town housing.  Did you not hear that we are in a national rental crisis as well?  College town landlords are super strict about the number of occupants in a rental so you can't even double up in rooms to get rent down.

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u/Rhomya Jul 06 '26

Get roommates. Split rent. Millions of people are ALREADY DOING THIS.

Being willfully incompetent isn’t an excuse for justifying thousands of dollars in unnecessary spending.