How Does Your Graduate Plan to Pay for College?

When the Class of 2012 graduates from Bloomfield High School next month, many of the students will be pursuing college degrees and of those, most will take out loans to cover the costs. But a recent New York Times special report cautioned that the problem of student debt is rapidly becoming a crisis -- with no end in sight.

"With more than $1 trillion in student loans outstanding in this country, crippling debt is no longer confined to dropouts from for-profit colleges or graduate students who owe on many years of education, some of the overextended debtors in years past," stated the report. "As [higher education] prices soar, a college degree statistically remains a good lifetime investment, but it often comes with an unprecedented financial burden."

How did we get to this trillion-dollar debt?  In the Times' investigative series, Degrees in Debt, reporters Andrew W. Lehren, a South Orange resident, and colleague Andrew Martin asked why borrowing so much has become the norm for so many families in the US.  What will be the implications of such astronomical college costs, and how will students and their families cope with such back-breaking debt?

According to the story, for all borrowers, the average debt in 2011 was $23,300, with 10 percent owing more than $54,000 and 3 percent more than $100,000, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Yet the article also states,"economists and many parents say that the only thing worse than graduating with lots of debt is not going to college at all, since study after study has shown that graduates earn more [than non-graduate] over a lifetime."

Click here to read ProPublica's round-up of the best -- and most depressing and astonishing -- journalism on the subject of student debt.