Debt plagues students, recent graduates

The nearly 40 percent of undergraduates that borrow money for their Penn education will each owe an average of $20,000 upon graduation.

Financial aid packages consist of three components. For the current freshman class, about 78 percent of the package is in grants, with loans making up 12 percent. The remaining 10 percent is earned by the student in a work-study job.

Although any amount of debt can seem overwhelming for many students, the University tries to keep student loans to a minimum, according to Bill Schilling, Penn's director of student financial aid.

"Penn's overall cost of education is over $40,000 a year. For a student with a lot of financial need, there's no way that the loan could be a majority of their package," Schilling said. "They just couldn't absorb that."

Schilling said that Penn not only tries to keep loans at a manageable level, but also must cope with competition.

"We want to keep our packages ... as attractive as possible in order to [make it easier for a student to] make the decision to come here," he said.

But once students decide to enroll at Penn, they are often forced to face the reality of living with debt.

Jerlina Love, a 2004 graduate of the College, said she wishes she had longer than the normal six-month grace period before having to begin the repayment of her loans.

After she graduated last spring, Love had to settle for an unpaid summer internship.

"I've got debt and I'm not making any money," she said, regarding how she felt while searching for a full-time, paying job.

Love said that she can relate to worried Penn students who are getting ready to face their debt.

"Around [December 2003] I was starting to get worried ... I can definitely identify with that looming fear," she said.

Engineering senior Mark Kupets will graduate in May but is able to defer his undergraduate loan payments because he's going to graduate school in the fall.

He has lined up a job so that he can go to work during the day and go to school at night.

"The main goal is to pay for law school as I go and with whatever is left over to start paying back the [undergraduate] loans," Kupets said.

Although Kupets and many other seniors receiving financial aid are much closer to the repayment period, many underclassmen have already begun to formulate plans for dealing with debt.

Nursing freshman Catherine Repetto has a scholarship, which does not have to be repaid if she works in the healthcare field in Pennsylvania for at least one year after graduation. She plans to take advantage of this stipulation, but said that she also wants to get her master's degree.

With graduate school loans on top of those from her undergraduate years at Penn, Repetto said that she wants to pay off her debt as soon as possible.

Stephanie Gonzales, a sophomore in the College, wants to go to business school but worries about having to pay for graduate school by herself.

After hearing stories of companies offering to fund entire graduate school educations, Gonzales hopes that she will get help as well. Otherwise, she said, "It'll definitely be all on me."

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