How Much Debt is Acceptable for College?

Chances are, if you or your children are going to college in Seattle, you are accumulating college debt.  Colleges and Universities have steadily increased tuition by at least four percent every year for the past ten years while federal programs to help with college tuition have not increased so your debt for college expenses has probably grown accordingly.  

Because of the high cost of living in Seattle, your college debt will probably be higher than if you were going to college in another area.  Of course, at public colleges you want to pay in state tuition if you possibly can, so if you live in Washington, you probably will want to go ahead and go to college in Washington even if the tuition for locals is a little higher than the tuition for locals at comparable public colleges in other states.

On the other hand, if you attend a private school, in state tuition usually does not apply.  If you plan to go to a private university, you can compare the $32,000 per year expense of a private university in Washington to the $24,000 per year expense of a comparable private university in Texas and decide if the costs will justify going the extra miles to and from college.

As a parent of college students in Seattle, you have to decide how much of your child's tuition you are willing and able to pay.  On average, students graduate from undergraduate school with $10,000 in debt.  Given the bill for four years of college, that can range from $40,000 for local tuition to public universities such as you will find in New Mexico to $120,000 for local tuition to public universities such as you will find in Washington, $10,000 is a proportionally small amount of debt for your child to bear.

In fact, if you earn over $80,000 per year, federal programs and banks will not allow your child to take out more than $10,000 in student loans because they expect you to bear the lion's share of the cost for college expenses.  If you have two or more children that are college age at the same time, federal programs and banks will still expect you to pay anything over the $10,000 in student loans that each child can accrue over their four years of college.

If you earn less than $80,000 per year, federal programs and banks will allow your children to take out student loans in increasing amounts according to your income because they know that you will not be able to bear so much of the college debt burden.

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