Hi, there. Someday Wise here, with more on the HOW of completing college without debt.
One of the most intriguing opportunities during the college years, is the chance to study abroad. That is, visit or live overseas for a while, as a component of your credit-earning journey. There are short trips of a month or less, traveling with a cohort and instructor from your own school, during breaks between terms. There are independent options to spend a couple of months with a host family in the summer. There are semester and full year programs as well. Some of them are truly unique, such as the Semester-at-Sea program, where you cruise around the world on a luxury ship, a/k/a “coolest campus on earth.”
As with nearly anything else, there is a wide range of price points. The cheapest option for a semester at sea, in a triple cabin, for fall 2018, is a cool $25,000. This includes 15 hours of class credit and living expenses. It’s no more expensive than a lot of college options, and I don’t see how they could cover operating costs for less. In other words, it’s probably a reasonable price tag.
Just because something is priced reasonably for the value, however, does not mean everyone can, or should, buy it. A Rolls-Royce Phantom may be “worth” $600,000, but most of us can’t ever have one anyway. Most of us drive boring, regular cars with names like Ford F-150 or Mitsubishi Outlander. And lots of us drive the cheapest car we can find, like an old Toyota Tercel, with perhaps something approaching 200,000 miles on it, that refuses to quit and was given to us as a hand-me-down car upon reaching our 16th year. They are worth their prices too.
So it is with study abroad. If you have limitless funds, or if you are bound and determined to rack up giant mountains of debt, because future problems are for the future and planning is for worrywarts, then by all means, sail off into the sunset, or lounge around the fabulous cities of Western Europe, or choose the absolute perfect, bucket list experience of your heart’s desire.
Someday Wise is not speaking to people like that. The internet is full of information on how you can get yourself all the college debt you could ever want, flaunting expensive college related opportunities of limitless variety. It’s a big giant marketplace, by the way, trying to get everyone into all sorts of debt, flaunting unneeded products also of limitless variety. But we’re talking about college here.
If study abroad is something that you want, need, or hope to include as part of your college program, at the very least you should understand the costs. And you should know that there are options that are FREE, or almost free.
As with full-ride scholarships, free study abroad comes with strings attached. The programs are competitive. They may not send you to the kind of romantic location you had envisioned. They may want some kind of follow-up commitment from you.
Enter the Critical Language Scholarship. This is a summer government program to encourage people to learn languages that they otherwise wouldn’t. They are sending people into exotic locations to study said languages in the interests of “national security and economic prosperity.” Wow. No pressure. Go learn an exotic language, then please come back and save America’s future.
Okay, perhaps I am overstating the commitment, but the idea is that these folks will eventually become passably fluent in the target language, and use that in their careers. Doing so will ostensibly foster better relations with other nations and cultures. What I am reading into all of this is: Potential for future government job as a translator, instructor, culture specialist or other language-related occupation. The FBI has people like that, as does the CIA. The army employs foreign language instructors.
Check out USAJOBS.gov with a keyword search for Language for a sample of related jobs. There are plenty of details on the full qualifications needed, so if you become inspired to aspire to one of them, you can start preparing early.
The Critical Language Scholarship is competitive and it has a long list of eligibility requirements even to apply. The languages are not those that come to mind immediately when thinking of your standard high school offerings. You can only choose to apply for one language, and I have not figured out how to identify which are less popular, thereby maximizing your chances by being in a smaller pool of applicants.
By and large, the available languages do not look super easy, as languages go. Several, such as Persian, Korean, and the Indian languages, use completely different writing systems, so you have to learn that along with the spoken words and grammar. Others, such as Indonesian and Turkish, are purported to be somewhat easier for speakers of English. Still, you can tell from this partial list, these are not the Spanish, French, or German that we typically imagine when we consider choices for international study.
With these language options comes the related cultural immersion in rather exotic locations. Four different cities in India. Tanzania. Oman. Tajikistan. Indonesia. Azerbaijan. Just to name a few. In two months, you get a year of language instruction. Also 8 college credit hours. All paid for by the U.S. government. Like other study abroad programs, students live with host families or dorms, and participate in culture or travel activities in addition to classroom time.
If such programs existed back in the 1980’s Someday Wise was fully unaware of them. Perhaps another symptom of that general lack of wisdom that has been haunting me for half a century. The CLS program is one of many ways to study abroad for something less than full price (in this case, nearly free. You do have to pay for your own passport, and I suppose you want to bring along some pocket change). Local colleges, including community colleges, may offer scholarships specifically for their own overseas programs. If you can’t get something for free, getting a discount, shallow or steep, is still better than paying retail!
Remember, a goal of graduating college with no debt is ideal. If this is simply not feasible, or involves sacrifices beyond your threshold, then try to think in terms of thousands. PAY CLOSE ATTENTION PLEASE. THIS NEXT PARAGRAPH IS WORTH THE PRICE OF ADMISSION. This is where one Someday Wise is going to show you how basic college loan math is easier than calculus, and yet something most students seem unable, or unwilling, to, well, calculate.
Every thousand dollars of debt you take on now, is at least another full year of monthly payments of roughly $150 in your future. So if you take on $30,000 of debt, you will be making payments of at least $152 per month, for at least thirty years. If you had only $29,000 of debt at 4.5% interest, you could instead pay $149 per month, for twenty-nine years. Every thousand dollars saved will decrease your repayment time by roughly another year at very slightly decreased (a dollar or two) monthly rates.
I realize this seems like a small difference now, and a small difference in payback years. But if you carry that monkey on your back someday for decades, every single month that debt will get more irritating. Satisfying the loan even 3 or 4 years early will feel like winning a small lottery. Satisfying it within a year or two after graduation, while your former classmates are looking ahead at decades of burden, will make you feel like a genius.
Heck, you might even be able to pay off your (small) loan(s) early because of the government job you got as a result of (almost) free study abroad. How cool would that be? Almost as cool as paying off your zero debt on graduation day, job or not.
If you do end up graduating with some debt, remember that shorter repayment periods have higher monthly payments, but reduce your overall payback sum. Money has something called a time value, and the longer you carry debt, the more it grows in the form of interest. This is money the lender earns in return for giving you the cash for a certain period of time.
If this is all just too much math, and too confusing, then WHY DO YOU THINK YOU SHOULD GO TO COLLEGE IN THE FIRST PLACE? College math is a lot harder than this. This is basic arithmetic. The kind of math you learned in elementary school. This is also math that falls under a much undertaught subject area known as personal finance. How to manage money that comes into, and goes out of, your life. Math you can actually use, and yet, many people don’t. To both kinds of people, those who do and don’t manage their money, I remain Someday Wise, and say to you, have a nice day!
Someday Wise 