Mike Meru is the "Poster Child" of the Student Loan Crisis

Mike Meru Has $1 Million in Student Loans. How Did That Happen? Escalating tuition and easy credit have yielded a class of student-loan borrowers with spectacular debt they may never pay back

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Mike Meru, a 37-year-old orthodontist, made a big investment in his education. As of Thursday, he owed $1,060,945.42 in student loans.

Mr. Meru pays only $1,589.97 a month—not enough to cover the interest, so his debt from seven years at the University of Southern California grows by $130 a day. In two decades, his loan balance will be $2 million.

He and his wife, Melissa, have become numb to the burden, focused instead on raising their two daughters. “If you thought about it every single day,” Mrs. Meru said, “you’d have a mental breakdown.”

Due to escalating tuition and easy credit, the U.S. has 101 people who owe at least $1 million in federal student loans, according to the Education Department. Five years ago, 14 people owed that much.

More could join that group. While the typical student borrower owes $17,000, the number of those who owe at least $100,000 has risen to around 2.5 million, nearly 6% of the borrowing pool, Education Department data show.

For graduate-school students especially, there is little incentive for universities to help put the brakes on big borrowing. The government essentially allows grad students to borrow any amount to cover tuition and living costs, with few guardrails on how the final sum will be repaid.

More than a third of borrowers from one of the government’s main graduate school lending programs have enrolled in some form of federal loan-forgiveness plan.

“These are choices. We’re not coercing,” said Avishai Sadan, dean of USC’s Herman Ostrow School of Dentistry, where Mr. Meru went to school and one of the most expensive in the U.S. “You know exactly what you’re getting into.”

Even the best planners might not have anticipated the sharp increases in tuition and student-loan interest rates from 2005 to 2012, Mr. Meru’s tenure as a student. While the Federal Reserve was reducing interest rates to near zero to combat the recession, rates for grad students were as high as 8.5%.

Dental school is the costliest higher-education program in the U.S. Private nonprofit schools during the 2015-2016 school year charged an average of $71,820 a year, the Urban Institute found. The USC program now costs $91,000 a year, and $137,000 when living expenses are included.

Comment: He makes over $ 200K per year has a $ 400K mortgage  (map) and drives a Tesla. Why are we subsidizing his life?!

Unfortunately, if you just forgive loans wo resolving why tuition is high in the first place, you have given schools carte blanche to raise tuition. Why wouldn’t they raise tuition if future loans will be forgiven too ? https://t.co/LTFhehOapy

— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) March 14, 2019