Oh debt... nah not for me but you can have it...

  Between forty-four million students who have borrowed to pay for college, we have accumulated nearly 1.3 trillion dollars in student loan debt. That's an average of $37,172 for four years, suggests studentloanhero.org. And this is not including extra costs when it comes to the type of college you attend and living expenses. The average tuition for a 4-year college being $18,000 a year. This is a hell of a lot more than a high school graduate with no financial support other than if they choose to add on the responsibility of a part-time minimum wage job. In a recent poll, over fifteen percent of parents cannot or will not contribute to their child's education, financially leaving over twenty-seven percent of students to cover most or all of the cost of college without proper means of income.

   All of high school, it has always been a major push to get excellent grades for the sake of college but never until the middle of this year did I realize the cost was so high and that my parent could not financially help me. This left me with a lot of choices for my future. During the course of the year, I had applied for over fifty widely different colleges with my intended major in mind, thinking my dad had saved up or started a fund for my college and that I would be able to work my way through the rest of the difference. But by November 30, the final day to turn in applications, I was given a huge wake-up call, I can not afford college on my own without taking out loans which my family is totally against (thanks to Dave Ramsey who I'm coming to the conclusion, my dad thinks is god. I despise this Ramsey guy tbh), so that would be out of the question. So college options were limited, it was between Grand canyon University, Yuba college, or no college.

   Grand Canyon University is a for-profit Christian college with a tuition lower than a state school and has excellent programs for the arts which are my intended major. I had the mindset that "hey, its an out of state school and my dad is not going to be able to help anyway, why stay here when my new "dream school" is calling me?" But the cost still being higher than I can afford even with a part time job, I had to decline this choice.

    My second choice honestly was no college because really I was focused on working towards my major but you don't actually start on your major until you get your associates so hoping for a name college would be pointless considering the cost and no college would just be fucking stupid in my opinion as of now. 

  So my final choice is Yuba College, by going here to get my associates I save around $50,000 compared to a well-known school I would have chosen to attend. Yuba college also offers a lot of the same classes that other colleges has as well but with little or no cost with the help of FAFSA and other financial aid services. This choice gives me time to save up for a state school where I can focus on my major. Economics is about the choices we make and how they affect us, in this situation I was able to make good choices with lasting effects that I would regret.