My parents paid or took out loans for about half of my college tuition and living expenses. I ended up with about $24k in loans.
I paid off about half of them before the rest of my loans were forgiven. I don't have any loans for my masters either, since my company paid for it, which makes me feel very lucky and a little guilty, since I know my parents are still paying for my college and my brother's, who is a few years younger. If we had the $$, I would love to pay them all off for my parents, but alas.
I grew up pretty poor, and had high hopes for attending a college far enough away from my parents and with a nice looking campus. Luckily, I got a LOT of aid from my small liberal arts school (a mix of grants and loans), and my grandparents had saved $20k in an account for me. That $20k covered the part of my tuition that the grants and loans did not, and I worked several part-time jobs to pay for books and living expenses.
The ironic part of all of this is that while I grew up poor, it wasn't because my parents were poor. My mother made very little money cleaning offices (lost her union job due to drug problems), but my father made like $90k/year in the 80's and just wouldn't share with me. I lived with him for the middle two years of HS and, while I was looking at colleges, he deemed them all "too expensive" and told me that he wanted me to continue to live with him, sleep on the sofabed, and attend our inner-city's community college, which was housed in like 1-2 rooms. There is absolutely nothing wrong with community college, but I had done pretty well on my SATs and knew that I could get into a 4 year school and that he totally had the $$ to help me pay for it. He just liked to spend it on hookers and blow. That reallllly pissed me off.
Anyway, I wound up graduating from a fairly pricey school with $20k in loans, so I feel pretty lucky. For law school, I had a combination of loans, scholarships, and part-time job income. Every now and then my grandparents would pay for tires for my car or glasses, the big expenses that you don't really anticipate when you're young and dumb. That was a HUGE help.
- Dad: "Do well in high school and I will pay for you to go to any college you get into."
- Me: "Even Harvard?"
- Dad: "Yes, anywhere. If you get in, I'll pay."
- Me: Works my butt off in high school to bring my grades up, and gets accepted to every school I apply to.
- Parents towards the end of my senior year: "It's your responsibility to research how you can get student loans to pay for college."
They paid for a small portion of my education, but not much. Had I known they weren't going to stand true to their word I probably would have looked at more state schools. Thankfully I received a $40k academic scholarship. I graduated with about $50k in SL debt when all was said and done, and I worked FT hours all through college to pay for books, living expenses, gas, etc. The loans made me sick, and I paid them off in 5 yrs.