Financing Your MBA: What Every Candidate Should Know

I actually think this is a good segue into my first question for you, which is, why does financing feel like such a barrier for so many candidates? And we've kind of answered this a little bit because it's more than just...

It seems to be more than just the, uh, the acquisition of funds.

It's sort of, what do I do once I have the funds? Where do I go? What's my career? It just sort of is like a, almost a microchasm of, um-

So many decisions, right?

Yeah.

And sometimes it's the first time that, first time that students have really been faced with these decisions.

Um, at the grad school space, sometimes it's the first time by themselves.

In undergrad, maybe their parents or a cosigner was helping them, and then when they get their, you know, they've un- they've graduated that undergrad degree and the parents are saying, "All right, now you're on your own.

You wanna get that graduate degree." And so this is the first time that they're having to make those big, scary decisions independently.

It's also one of the biggest decisions they will make, one of the biggest financial commitments that they are making, and it's an investment in your future.

You just said, like, you didn't know what you were doing.

You just knew that, like, "If I get this, I think this is probably going to set me up for success." But there's unknowns of what that's actually going to look like.

And so, [coughs] calculating that true ROI can be tricky and scary, and you don't know, and you don't know what the economy's gonna look like at the time that you get out.

And so all of that just can put people in a stalled pattern, or they, they don't know what to do.

Also, the federal government continues to change, um, what support they're providing in the, uh, way of federal loans.

And so that change, the confusion, the, um, newsjacking that's happening, um, can really leave additional uncertainty that just can make people freeze sometimes because they, they don't know what's going to happen, what support is going to be provided, when repayments are going to be due, et cetera.

Yeah.

Definitely.

I'm the kind of person who, if I don't know what's going on at the very start of a process, I'm likely going to not continue on with it.

Uh, and I wonder if there-- I'm sure there's people listening to this podcast who are, who are just like me in that regard, and I wonder if you're able to talk about, um, like, where people seem to get most overwhelmed or stuck, and maybe shed some light if it's like this is, that's the hardest part, and then the rest of it is just little pieces [laughs] after that.

Do you know what I mean? Like, where is that big clog, um, that you think that people should, should try to, to get over?

So one of them is what that full cost of attendance actually is.

Like, you get the tuition bill, but it, there's more than tuition, right? There's housing, there's living expenses, there's lost, um, income because you're going to school.

There's then, like, travel for networking to then go get the job with the degree that you've just received.

Um, possibly childcare or family expenses that if you're at home and now you're not going to be at home anymore, right? That, um, that's, that's an additional expense.