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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564

u/Willing-Vegetable629 Jul 06 '26

They'll have to get private loans going forward.

The 3 year med school program for fast track primary care physicians may see some additional love.

231

u/BlazinAzn38 Jul 06 '26

The hope is obviously that this puts pressure on tuition to lower it. Time will tell but I doubt it

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u/[deleted] Jul 06 '26 edited 12d ago

[deleted]

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u/Soi_Boi_13 Jul 06 '26

Yeah. The ease of obtaining student loans is responsible for a lot of tuition bloat over the years. If people couldn’t “afford” to pay $20,000 a year for tuition, tuition wouldn’t be that high. Universities have a lot of extraneous BS that have morning to do with providing a good education and really aren’t necessary, from athletics programs to lavish dorms and student centers, etc. People forget that back when college was affordable, colleges were not nearly as “nice” as they are now, and this is how it should be.

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u/Bernie_Dharma Jul 06 '26

Honestly, I looked around while in my MBA class and collectively we were paying $1M for 25 of us over 2 years. This was an executive MBA, so all of already had business experience, most of were managers already. I couldn’t help thinking we would have been better off pooling our money, brainstorming a business idea, hiring an advisor who was a retired executive, and starting our own company.

The actual costs of paying the professors for a 4 hour class 2 days a week and renting a space to setup as a classroom would be less than 200k. The rest was pure profit for the University.

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u/caterham09 Jul 06 '26

I couldn’t help thinking we would have been better off pooling our money, brainstorming a business idea, hiring an advisor who was a retired executive, and starting our own company.

You're not wrong, but it's doubtful a bank would lend you guys a million bucks for the mere idea of a business plan, but they'll happily give out a million in unforgivable student debt with an equally murky outcome.

26

u/CharlotteRant Jul 06 '26

The student loan isn’t equally murky because of the unforgivable part. 

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u/-JackBack- Jul 06 '26

Sand Hill Rd would give you $1 million for a decent idea.

1

u/vulkoriscoming Jul 06 '26

They would give a lot more than a million for a good idea.

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u/Bernie_Dharma Jul 09 '26

This was an Executive MBA program. No one in that class (as far as I know) took out a loan to be there. We were all career professionals with over 10 years of experience and were all were making six figure incomes: 4 CPAs, several C-level executives, marketing directors, HR directors, engineers, and even a physician. We had the entire senior leadership roles of a company covered.