Affluent parents pressure 17-year-old daughter to take out $400K in student loan debt to get her undergraduate degree: 'I love my dream school, but I love my future more.'

Why do they want their daughter to suffer in the long run? For some people, taking out student loans is the only way they can attend college. Their parents didn't or couldn't save enough for them to attend a four-year institution, and even if they worked full-time while in school, they still can't afford to pay upfront. Because going to college has been sold as a way to guarantee success for yourself, the student loan crisis has gotten totally out of hand.Some degrees make much more sense to take loans out for than others. If you're going to medical school, I'm guessing you probably don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for school upfront. If so, you're a total anomaly. Medical schools can justify charging so much because their graduates will go on to be high earners, so they trust their alumni can pay back what they borrowed. But the tricky thing about student loans is that you can't always guarantee that you'll graduate, or that you'll get the income that you're aiming for after graduation. If you take out $200K in student loans for medical school and you drop out before you become a doctor, you still are going to have to pay that balance eventually, even if you're …

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