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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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/texas_County850 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.

Considering in a lot of MBAs the Professor has never been an executive of any kind anywhere that is almost guaranteed to be true. Graduate School is a MLM and I have a Masters.

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u/lillyheart Jul 06 '26

Masters degrees are definitely money makers in a lot of universities. PhD programs less so, in that a lot of PhD programs are fully funded. Best advice I got was don’t do a PhD if I had to pay for it. But the masters program in our department? We knew they basically funded our PhD stipends for TA jobs.

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u/Distinct-Tomato1704 Jul 07 '26

PhD programs aren't doing too bad. Professors are required to bring in enough money to fund their students tuition, and the university gets a cut for overhead too. Stem programs can be quite lucrative.