Betsy Mayotte

longstanding players in the private student loan market sort of expanding their offerings.

We're seeing some new players in the market starting to sniff around.

We're also hearing some chatter about some private lenders wanting schools to have some skin in the game.

In other words, saying to the school, we want you to, to some extent, guarantee everything

at least some of these loans before we'd be willing to offer these loans to your students.

And the school's sort of not necessarily being willing to do that.

So I think this is going to be something to watch in the long term, you know, whether there is going to be more private loan availability or if it's going to simply mean that some schools are going to drop programs because the federal loan limits won't cover them.

So I think any family who's looking at making the college decision

First of all, and this makes me so sad to say, but the days of education for education's sake are gone.

And now college is almost entirely a return on investment calculation.

And when you're looking at making the college decision, I strongly urge you to not just look at how much are we gonna have to borrow or how much is it gonna cost us for year one?

You need to look at it for the entire degree and especially for undergrad at a year.

Something like 70% of students take over four years to complete a four-year undergraduate degree.

So you need to calculate how much am I gonna have to borrow for the full program?

Is there going to be enough in federal student loans for me to complete that degree?

not only how much am I going to have to borrow, but do the math and figure out what that's going to look like as far as a monthly payment amount is going to be.

And then do a mock budget based on the anticipated starting salary to see if that amount is going to be affordable.

If the federal student loans are not going to be enough and you may have to look at private, tread with caution.

And again, do the same math.

How much will the total borrowing be?