一起算算读大学的成本

Imagine getting a great education without borrowing any money, without taking out loans and without mooching off your parents. This guy did it. Zac Bissonnette is a senior at UMass Amherst and the author of Debt-Free U. You wrote a book about the experience. Most kids end up either mooching off their parents or getting a huge, complicated student loan package and graduate with $20,000-some in student debt. That is not you.

No. That's the absolute worst thing that you can do is your retirement, your parents' retirement. The second worst thing you can do is put yourself into a bunch of debt to pay for college.

Most important thing here is don't go for those rich schools, for those elite schools. I mean, you're just chasing after a dream that you could really; you can be the great kid at the other schools that are going to cost less.

Absolutely, Christine. There was a study out of Princeton that found that students who were accepted into elite colleges but attended less selective colleges actually ended up earning just as much money as students who went to elite colleges. What determines your success in life is who you are, how hard you work, how smart you are, not the name on your diploma.

It's also what you do with it. I mean, one of the things - we talk about the student debt, and I want - I just want to get your perspective on this. We talk about all the student debt the kids graduate with, some $20,000, yet there's this study, this book, actually, this week, that was released that's fascinating, that shows that 45 % of students after the first two years of college, they don't show any gains of learning, Zac. So they're paying all this money and they're not really getting very far. And then you look at how kids are spending their time in college - Academically Adrift is the name of this book, and it shows that kids spend most time socializing and recreating. I mean, what does that tell us about the value, I guess, we're putting on college and the time? We're paying so much for it.

The first thing it tells you, because I hear this from parents all the time. They say to me, I don't want my kid to work during college because then he wouldn't have time to study. I mean, you look at the results of this survey and Academically Adrift. About half their time is spent socializing. That's a laughable sort of argument, that your kid needs the time to study.

The average college…

They're not studying.

The average college student is drunk 10.2 hours per week. So if you think that your kids should not work during college…

So they should be working, not being drunk?

Absolutely. And…

You work, right?

I do. Yeah.

Right. I did too.

And I say this all the time, like if you're going to go into debt so that you can drink beer and play video games, I don't think that's sane.

So, look, you say that kids should be working, kids should be helping pay for college. What about loans? I mean, avoid loans all together?

Here's the deal, tuition and fees and room and board at the average four-year public college in America runs to $15,500 a year. Most families also get a $2,500 cash credit which brings the cost down to $13,000 a year which, if you break that out over the course of the year, it works up to $250 per week, assuming you have no savings. So if you have the kid working and the parents cutting expenses back, not looting retirement, just skipping lattes and that kind of thing, it's not an insurmountable amount of money to come up with. It's certainly not an amount of money that you need to borrow $20,000 or $30,000 or $40,000 or $50,000 for.

All right, Zac Bissonnette. Debt-Free U is the name of the book. Thanks so much. And, you know, and I met Zac on Facebook and Twitter because we were starting to talk about the same conversations about saving money and how to get ready for college. So, best of luck to you and great to meet you, and thanks for coming on the program.

Thanks so much.