New Use for College Loans: Spring Break!
Yup, more than half of college students are using some of their student loan money to pay for spring break.
It’s the peak season, and 21st century ingenuity is being applied to the age-old problem of paying for college trips to popular, sunny climates like Miami and Cabos San Lucas in Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. LendEdu decided to do a survey to answer a question that Mike Brown put so succinctly in his blog:
How can “so many students living on a shoestring budget afford to go on a not-so-cheap weeklong getaway”?
The mechanism allowing this can be found in college financial aid offices, which funnel loan money directly to students after, wisely, deducting tuition and fees.
Fifty-one percent of the students who were surveyed are financing their beer, hotels, and air fares with another popular source: parents. Spring break is typically paid for with whatever they can scrape together from parents, loans, and part-time jobs – frequently in that order.
LendEdu, a New Jersey credit card and student loan refinancing firm, hired Pollfish for its March survey of 1,000 college juniors nationwide who have student loans and are planning spring break 2018.
Brown is 24 and earned his University of Delaware degree in 2016. His parents paid for his Cancún trip during junior year, and he did not have to use his loans, which he’s still paying off.
“If my parents found out I was using that loan check to pay for spring break, they would’ve had a couple words with me,” he said.
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This is one reason why I will not be paying for my children’s college. Subsidized loans and loan forgiveness has created a disincentive to minimize education costs. Instead, I have set up a trust and they will receive income for retirement.
Youth is wasted on the young. Glad to see that some understand the true purpose of a college education.
What does this say about the financial acumen of this generation?
They are either very smart for finding a way to scam the system, or they are very dumb for not planning for the future.
As Alfred E. Neumann says, “What, me worry?”
Give a mouse a cookie and he’ll ask for a glass of milk.
Too many kids just feel entitled. And want loan forgiveness too.
Much wants more.
I once had a college student say to me, “Oh, I would never use student loan money for spring break!”
My reply: If you have student loans, then they’re what’s paying for spring break. Why? Because if you didn’t take spring break, you could borrow less money.