A Note on Borrowing A Note on Borrowing Over the last 20 years, loans have replaced grants as the primary source of financial aid to college students. Loans make going to college more manageable financially, but you do have to repay them with interest after leaving school. Loans must be paid back even if an individual decides not to complete school or obtain a degree. For many college students, the decision regarding how much to borrow plays a central role in determining which college they can afford. How much debt individuals are willing to incur to finance their college education is an extremely important and necessarily individual decision.
Many people are concerned about borrowing too much.
To give you an idea of what you will face, we provide information concerning the amount of debt a recent group of college students had built up by their final year in school. This is broken down according to the type of school they attended. The sufficiency of any income, of course, depends on what other expenses you have. Therefore, these figures are only rough estimates. The table below shows the percent of students in their final year at college who borrowed money to attend college.