David’s $60K Debt 

From zero to sixty in two semesters

I was privileged enough to finish my undergraduate degree at Penn State University with zero debt. My parents graciously funded eight semesters of in-state tuition for their beloved only child. If I had taken an extra semester to finish, I’d have been on the hook for it. I made sure not to do that.

With a degree in Immunology and Infectious Disease but no desire to work in a lab, I decided instead to become a science journalist. None of my options were cheap (NYU, BU, UC Santa Cruz, MIT) but BU offered a two semester MS for which a thesis was not required.

Boston University advises that you take out $64k in order to cover two semesters of tuition, food, housing etc. I had a $10k scholarship so I took out $54k. Tuition alone is $45.6k for two semesters. (http://www.bu.edu/finaid/aid-basics/cost-of-education/graduate/)

I remember filling out the loan forms and thinking I must have been totally off my rocker. I’d never had more than four thousand dollars in my bank account at any given moment and here I was about to borrow more than thirteen times that amount. It was so much money to me that it almost felt like none.

Hilariously, despite my utter lack of credit history or substantiative employment record, the loans went right on through—even with no cosign. Soon enough I had more money in my bank than ever before by an order of magnitude…granted a lot of it immediately went to cover the (ridiculous) cost of tuition.

This is my $60k debt story though and so far I’ve only explained $54k of it. I took out the last six grand to cover the tuition for my summer internship. You read that right. The BU program requires you complete a summer internship, but you have to pay them tuition to do it. You have to pay BU to work for someone else. Summer session costs a couple grand (I forget the exact figure), but I took out the maximum $6k because my internship is in Manhattan…and like, rent man.

Fortunately, my internship is with Nautilus Magazine and it’s a paid position. Some of my friends at BU weren’t so lucky and are now paying BU thousands of dollars for the privilege to work a job for free.

I loved the science journalism masters program at BU. It was as good an education as I could’ve hoped for. But the whole time I was there I kept asking myself, is this worth going 60k in the red? I think the answer for any 24-year-old is probably “No.” No education is worth that much, I don’t care how good it is.

But maybe a career alongside, Richard Preston, Maryn McKenna, and Burkhard Bilger is worth that kind of coin. Hopefully that’s what I paid for. That’s what I keep telling myself anyway…