Making Student Debt Decisions Personal
I want to welcome Christian Sherrill to the NGPF team. He will be laser-focused on increasing access to financial education in classrooms across the United States. This is a story he wanted to share about why he is so passionate about financial education.
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As the new NGPF documentary suggests, millennial college-educated professionals aren’t alone in having made costly investments in student loans. Lifelong educators with multiple degrees have ‘em...
Chart: How Well Do Students Estimate The Monthly Payment On Their Student Loans?
Answer: No real surprise here. They are abysmal at it.
Here’s an explanation of this scatter plot (see below) from the recent Sallie Mae report on How America Pays for College:
Separately, students seem not to be fully cognizant of how much they will repay. Students were asked to estimate their future monthly student loan payments based on the amount of loans they currently have. Similarly to 2008, a scatterplot of responses indicates little correlation between the amounts students...
NGPF Podcast: Tim Talks To Social Entrepreneur Ted Gonder, Co-Founder of Moneythink
By Tim Ranzetta
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Jul 24, 2017
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Podcasts, Paying for College, Student Loans, Current Events, Entrepreneurship
I had a great time talking with social entrepreneur, Ted Gonder, who co-founded Moneythink. Moneythink is a non-profit organization helping firstgen high school students navigate “to and through” college. Ted shares what he has learned since starting Moneythink out of his college dorm room at the University of Chicago and his personal odyssey to pursue the “road less traveled.” He discusses the thinking behind the new service delivery model for Moneythink and why the...
Question: Are College Costs Rising?
By Tim Ranzetta
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Jul 23, 2017
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Chart of the Week, Paying for College, Question of the Day, Research, Current Events, Math, Economics
From WSJ (Subscription required):
Questions for students:
Create a one sentence description for the trends seen in each of the two graphs.
A friend says, “What a bummer that college costs keep rising at an incredible rate!” Using the data from the graph on the left, provide a response to her assertion.
Since 1990, all consumer prices (aka the rate of inflation) have basically doubled. Using the rule of 72, make an estimate as to what the inflation rate has averaged from 1990-2016....
UPenn "The Process" Podcast: College Rankings, SAT vs. ACT and Financial Aid Process
Part 2 of the UPenn “The Process” Podcast series continues with conversations about college rankings, whether to take the SAT and/or ACT, the Financial Aid process and the college essay. Here’s a summary of the notes from the podcast:
Podcast 2: The Process- College Rankings, SAT vs. ACT and Financial Aid Process
Eric Furda- Dean of Wharton School of Business & co-host Eileen Cunningham Feikens- Director of College Counseling at the Dwight-Englewood School & guest...
NGPF FAVORITES: Our Best OFF TO COLLEGE Resources
By Tim Ranzetta
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Jul 07, 2017
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Activities, Credit Scores, Activity, Behavioral Finance, Career, Paying for College, Budgeting, Savings, Student Loans, Stocks, Current Events, Interactive
This month’s NGPF Favorites List comes from Sid Sharma – one of NGPF’s veteran “Power Interns” who has been with us for 3 years. Sadly, we will wish him well as he heads off to college this fall! We wanted Sid to reflect on his NGPF experience (he has literally “touched” every element in the NGPF curriculum) and highlight the resources that have enabled him to become the knowledgeable, action-oriented, process-innovator that he is today!...
What I'm Reading This Week (ending June 9th)
By Tim Ranzetta
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Jun 09, 2017
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Current Events, Behavioral Finance, Career, Paying for College, Research, Credit Cards, Article
What are the ramifications of an aging population around the world (Visual Capitalist
infographic)? Among other elements, it has neat map showing percentage of population in each state over
the age of 65:
Hat tip to Hari (newest NGPF team member) for pointing out this article and interactive about robots taking over
the workplace (Daily
Mail):
Researchers have warned that millions of human workers will be
replaced by robots over the next few...
What's The Catch?: Student Loan Forgiveness Or...
By Tim Ranzetta
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May 31, 2017
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Activities, Activity, Paying for College, Student Loans, Advertising, Current Events, Case Study
What if you were a student loan borrower struggling to make your monthly payment and saw this ad pop up on your computer screen one day:
Or maybe this one:
When you called the customer service phone number, you hear assurances like…
“Let me enroll you in a student loan forgiveness program and we will get your monthly payment reduced and even get your loan forgiven.”
“We will get you pre-approved for Federal government programs that will forgive or eliminate your...
Student Loans: You Better Know What You're Signing Up For!
By Tim Ranzetta
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May 24, 2017
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Activities, Activity, Paying for College, WebQuest, Student Loans, Current Events
As your seniors head off to college in the fall, you better arm them with the information they need to succeed financially during and after college. The biggest issue they will deal with in college: Student Loans. They will be required to go through an online “counseling” process which I would describe as “too little, too late” just before their loan is disbursed. I was trying to come up with a fun way (Ok, I might be stretching it here) to get them to review what in...
Question: What Are The New Interest Rates on Federal Student Loans?
By Tim Ranzetta
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May 12, 2017
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Question of the Day, Paying for College, Research, Student Loans, Current Events
Answer: 4.45% for federal direct student loans effective July 1, 2017 (up from 3.76% for 2016-17 school year).
Why the increase? Student loan interest rates are now tied to the 10 Year Treasury Bond interest rate.
From Bloomberg:
New undergraduate loans from the Department of Education are due to carry an interest rate of 4.45 percent, up from 3.76 percent for the academic year ending in June. Rates on some graduate loans are set to rise from 5.31 percent to 6 percent, while rates on loans to...
One Strategy to Keep College Costs Down: Graduate In 4 Years
As your seniors are heading out the door this spring to pursue higher education, this would be a valuable required reading.
“Six Reasons You May Not Graduate On Time (And What To Do About It)” From NYT:
Graduating from a four-year college in four years may sound like a fairly straightforward venture, but only 41 percent of students manage to do it.
That matters. The longer it takes, the less likely a student is to make it to graduation: A quarter of students drop out after four...
Article: This Is One Case Where A PLUS Is Not So Positive
WSJ article out today warning of the dangers of Parent PLUS loans. I thought this was particularly pertinent as high school seniors pore over their financial aid award letters before making a May 1st decision. Here’s the lede:
Millions of U.S. parents have taken out loans from the government to help their children pay for college. Now a crushing bill is coming due. Hundreds of thousands have tumbled into delinquency and default. In the process, many have delayed retirement, put off health...
What Do High School Seniors Think About the Financial Aid Process?
By Tim Ranzetta
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Apr 13, 2017
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Behavioral Finance, Paying for College, Student Loans, Current Events, Chart of the Week
It’s April so I thought I would do a temperature check for my AVID class just before we dove into an activity analyzing aid award packages. Here’s the word cloud that came from their individual responses (with some mentor comments sprinkled in which tended to be more on the positive side):
Why did I do this?
I think this is the “elephant in the room” for many first gen students and by identifying it, I thought I had an opportunity to address it. We know the importance...
From March Madness to April Anguish...
Yes, it’s that time of the year..thin envelopes, thick envelopes, cost of attendance, financial aid, subsidized loans, unsubsidized loans and the dreaded PLUS loan plug (for the uninitiated, the Parent PLUS loan is often the way that financial aid offices get their offers to balance out). Here are three activities from our Paying for College unit that I used recently with AVID students at Mountain View High School to lessen the anguish of this process and prepare them to analyze their own...
What I Have Been Reading This Week...
By Tim Ranzetta
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Mar 31, 2017
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Article, Credit Scores, Career, Paying for College, Question of the Day, Research, Credit Cards, Investing, Student Loans, Current Events, Credit Reports
Here’s a weekly round-up of articles that caught my attention this week that I thought you would find interesting:
Want to find out what it feels like to own a volatile stock? Find out how this investor got emotional by making a $3 trade in this MarketWatch article, “I drove myself crazy by investing $3 in the stock market.”
“Turns out, it doesn’t cost much to drive yourself batty over your investments. For the past week, ever since I broke one of my cardinal...
