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College Graduates Returning Home with Major Debt

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Joe Liebeskind interned with the New Jersey Nets (now called the Brooklyn Nets) in the summer of his junior year of college. At the end of the internship, his coordinator said a job would be waiting for him once he finished school. But the diploma he received in December 2008 wasn’t the golden ticket he thought it would be—bad timing meant the team couldn’t hire him.

After graduating from Pennsylvania State University, Joe moved back in with his parents in Hillsdale, N.J., for three-and-a-half years. However, his decision to live at home wasn’t a result of not landing a job with the basketball team. “I was always planning to move home for at least a year to try and [save] some money, as to not be living paycheck to paycheck with the cost of rent,” he says.

Many of today’s college graduates follow Joe’s path. An estimated 3 in 10 young adults have moved back in with their parents in recent years, according to a Pew Research Center survey released in March. Saving money is their chief concern, as nearly 80 percent of those currently living at home say they don’t have enough money put away to lead the kind of independent life they want.

The high cost of education is partly to blame: The average 2011 college graduate with student loans owed $26,600. Consequently, many of today’s graduates—known as “boomerang kids”—are turning to their parents for monetary support. They’ve returned to their childhood homes, hoping that living under their parents’ roof will enable them to find a job and save enough money to move out…

Read More: money.usnews.com

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