By Maura Lerner, Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
MINNEAPOLIS — Ashley Hall remembers clicking “yes” on the loan application and, inexplicably, laughing.
Maybe it’s because the number seemed so surreal. Or because no one else in her family had done this before. But there she was, borrowing nearly $75,000. For her first year of veterinary school at the University of Minnesota.
Even now, two years later, it’s hard for her to believe. By the time she graduates in 2016, she’ll owe more than $300,000.
Hall, a 28-year-old from Georgia, never planned it this way.
But like many ambitious students, she’s been swept up in a tsunami of debt that only seems to grow more ominous. “I will be paying off my loans for the rest of my life,” Hall says with a wry smile. “I probably will die with a loan debt.”
Today, the typical college student graduates with $29,400 in student loans.
But that pales in comparison to what Hall and other graduate and professional students are borrowing to get an education. At the University of Minnesota veterinary school, one of the most expensive in the country, the average student debt in 2013 soared to $188,000.
Those kinds of numbers are stoking national anxiety that student debt has gotten so out of hand that it threatens to drag down an entire generation.
Hall, who has a husband and 6-year-old son, is understandably obsessed with the subject. She wavers between outright despair (“What was I thinking?”) and youthful optimism (“It’ll all work out”).
But she can’t help wondering: Is a mountain of debt a reasonable price to pay to follow one’s dream?
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Shazam, a 20-year-old quarter horse, is in his “recovery room” at the Leatherdale Equine Center on the university’s St. Paul campus. Hall, the veterinarian in training, dips her shoes into a sterilizing bath as she trails Dr. Jenny Brown into the treatment stall to check on her patient.
Nearly a month after brain surgery, Shazam looks a little battered and listless. One eye is temporarily sewn shut, and IV bags hang from an overhead girder. But today, he’s going home.
Hall is transfixed, soaking up the details of his medical treatment.
This, after all, is what she’s come for, why she’s been willing to borrow the equivalent of “a mortgage on a mansion,” as she puts it, to get her degree. “I love working with animals,” she says simply. “It’s my passion.”
Once Shazam gets the all-clear to leave, Hall watches sympathetically as his owner tries to coax the skittish horse into the trailer for the ride home.
“That’s the hard part of being a veterinarian,” Hall says. “It’s your job to be able to read the animal and see what they’re not telling you.”
Growing up in Georgia, Hall recalls, becoming a veterinarian wasn’t on her radar; she barely expected to finish high school.
She was raised by her grandparents in a small house on the outskirts of Atlanta. Both her mother and grandmother dropped out of school and cleaned houses for a living.
With little encouragement at home, Hall says, she was a rather aimless C-student by age 15.
Then she met a teenage boy who convinced her she was selling herself short.
“She was failing a lot of her classes, and didn’t care, when I met her,” said Alistair Hall, the teenage boy who eventually became her husband.
It was he, his wife says, who planted the idea that she could go to college. “He kind of inspired me to see myself in a different light,” she said. “I kind of just flipped a switch.”
Once she started applying herself, she found that schoolwork came easily.
“Before I knew it, I was taking AP Spanish,” she said. She raised her GPA from 1.9 to 3.4, enough to qualify for Georgia’s HOPE Scholarship, funded by the state lottery, to pay for her college education.
When she realized what she was capable of, her husband said, “it was like a drug. She just wanted to be the best.” She became an honors student at Georgia Southern University.
One day, while in college, she arranged to shadow a veterinarian at a small-animal clinic. “Within two seconds of being there, I knew I was exactly where I wanted to be,” she said.
She made up her mind to apply to vet school.
But there were obstacles. And money, at first, was the least of her worries.
Newly engaged at the start of her senior year, she discovered she was pregnant with their son, Devin. So she put off the application process for a year.
Then, despite graduating from college cum laude, she was rejected by vet schools two years in a row.
Undeterred, she redoubled her efforts, working as a veterinary assistant to build up her resume, and waiting tables for extra money. The third year, she got in almost everywhere she applied.
The University of Minnesota was by far her most expensive option. For out-of-state students, tuition and fees are $58,000, more than triple what she’d pay in Georgia.
But Minnesota was the only vet school in an urban area, with plenty of job opportunities for her husband, an engineer. Back in Georgia, during the recession, he had found himself cleaning houses to earn money.
In Minnesota, he got a job offer from an engineering firm right away; and as young parents, they loved the Minneapolis school system. “It just felt like the right thing to do,” Hall said. “We figured it would all work out.”
They learned that, under federal rules, she could borrow nearly $75,000 in government-subsidized loans to cover tuition and living expenses that first year. They decided to take out the maximum.
Looking back, she said, they didn’t fully appreciate what that meant.
Now, depending on her repayment options, it could cost her up to $2,400 a month for 20 years to pay for her four years of training.
“I was thinking, ‘This is just what you do, it will be fine,’ ” she said. “You don’t process the debt right away. All you can see is the big goal. The dream.”
As a rule of thumb, experts say, students should not borrow more than they reasonably expect to earn, in annual salary, after graduation.
By that measure, veterinary students are taking a big leap of faith.
The average starting salary was $65,000 in 2012, while the average student debt was $152,000, according to a survey by the American Veterinary Medical Association. To make matters worse, salaries were on the decline, while debt was steadily climbing.
But scholarships are a rarity in professional schools such as veterinary medicine, U officials say.
Most students have two choices: cash or credit.
As a result, some are almost dreading graduation day, when the bills come due.
“It’s just this giant storm cloud that’s always hovering over your head,” said Rachel Rice, a U veterinary student from North Carolina who is facing more than $300,000 in loans. “It hasn’t started raining yet, because technically I’m not paying them back yet. But it’s there and it’s blotting out the sun.”
Photo: “thisisbossi” via Flickr
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