Woman Accrues $500K in Student Loan Debt for Degrees in Naturopathic Medicine and Acupuncture
“It really effects the remainder of your life,” Bokman said. “There’s no out.”
Many Americans wouldn’t even consider buying a $500,000 home. How does someone borrow this much for education?
CNBC reports:
More student loan borrowers carry six-figure balances
Elisha Bokman has been out of school for eight years. Still, her student loan balance is half a million dollars.
Today, for her doctorate degree in naturopathic medicine and master’s in acupuncture from Bastyr University, she owes $499,322.69.
She and her husband struggled to buy a house because of her debt. Eventually, the financial stress led them to a divorce. “He felt like he couldn’t live his life or do the things he wanted to do,” Bokman, 38, said. She wanted to open her own medical practice, but she said her student debt prevents her from getting a business loan.
“It really effects the remainder of your life,” Bokman said. “There’s no out.”
The average college graduate leaves school $30,000 in the red today, up from $10,000 in the 1990s. Yet much larger balances are becoming more common.
Around 178,000 graduate students owed more than $100,000 in the 2015-2016 academic year, up from 51,000 in 2003-2004, according to Mark Kantrowitz, the publisher of SavingForCollege.com. In the first quarter of 2019, over 6% of all student loan borrowers owed more than $100,000, up from 5.4% in 2017.
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Comments
Oh, boo-hoo. One google search of “Bastyr University” (promoting itself as one of the ‘top 168 medical schools in the country’ – at a time when there were only 162 legitimate medical schools in the country), while charging the same tuition as said legitimate schools, should have sent this prospective student running for the hills. Caveat emptor. And don’t make taxpayers pay for your mistake.
$500,000 for garbage degrees, and she’s surprised that it affects her life? It’s hard to believe that all of the half million dollars went to her education and not to, for example, vacations, etc. while she went to school. I see there’s no mention of what she’s doing for a living.
The article is almost a month old and the question I had when I first read it still stands: How can anyone be that stupid?
Any adult should no better than to go into debt $500K to become a quack.
The worst part of this is that there is a federal govt that allows the robbers at the quackery schools to commit theft against the student debtors and taxpayers to keep the racket going. If the guaranteed loans were not available, the schools would fold like a cheap suit because there is no real demand in a properly functioning marketplace.
Contrast that with nurses and nursing schools that can turn out competent nurses.
She obtained worthless certificates while avoiding reality and funding her lifestyle on borrowed money.
Worse, the deadbeat thinks that she needs to borrow money to fund her “medical” practice.
Choke on it, WITCH MONGER.
This exactly…she didn’t want to do anything meaningful and wanted to live off the loan scam until someone (a Dem) came along and picked up the tab for her.
That should be
“It really affects the remainder of your life…”
I double-checked CNBC and you quoted sic. They must be struggling with copy editors, too.