by Cody Hodge

Created on: March 11, 2009

A college education is one of the most important things that you can have in your life. It will help open doors for you professionally, and will allow you to mature as a person, and have experiences that you won't have anywhere else. College is almost a necessity these days if you want certain jobs, and especially those that pay a lot of money, and require a lot of advanced knowledge. However, college is a very expensive proposition, and is it a good thing to assume the debt from your time in school?

It almost seems like you don't have much of a choice when it comes to taking on debt to go to college. Even if you go to community college, and you don't take out loans, the amount of time it takes to save, and then actually take the classes one by one is a long time. I have had friends take years just to get past the first year of community college because they can't save up enough money to pay for the classes.

It is a pain to pay off student loans though, and it takes forever to pay them off. Even without interest, it takes a long time to pay off, and takes about a decade or two, even if you are aggressive about paying off your loans. Considering that student loans aren't the only bills that you will have to pay off, it makes it that much harder to pay off your loans.

If you can avoid taking on massive amounts of debts for college, and you have a lot of income, or your parents are willing to pay for your school you are lucky. Even if you have parents paying for your schooling, what about graduate school? I had a friend who did research for a local college, and they didn't even pay a portion of his tuition for going to grad school. He just got ten bucks an hour to do research.

I do believe though, that if you go to college, you should be able to enjoy it, and worry about paying for it until later on in life. You have plenty of time to be poor, and adjust to the myriad of bills that you have to pay after school. The point of college is to get your education, and have some fun on the side. It isn't the time to start financial planning for the next thirty years, and even if it is smart to at least get an idea of how you will pay, the actual paying should be left for later.

When you are in college, you don't have time to either work a full-time job and not make enough to go to school on a regular basis. You also don't have the time to go to school, and find a job that you can work enough hours a week to pay off your tuition. Unless that is the only bill that you have to pay, it just seems unrealistic to expect you can pay for college while in college, unless someone else is paying for you.

If that is the case, more power to you, and definitely take the money. For the majority of us who have to pay ourselves, just worry about school while you are in school, and worry about your debt load after school. If you worry too much during school, you may not do well enough to get a job to pay your loans after you graduate.

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