Wow, those numbers really, really suck. I didn't go to an Ivy, I went to state tech school. My loans were at 4.5% (!) when I started, and the last one was ~7.

Wow, those numbers really, really suck. I didn't go to an Ivy, I went to state tech school. My loans were at 4.5% (!) when I started, and the last one was ~7.5%. My initial tuition was $2500/sem, ended at $4500. Note, that's over an 11 year period, covering bachelor's-PhD. Folks covered undergrad, and I did a lot of research work to cover many semesters of graduate school. My loans are somewhere around $50k total. Each semester's loan usually left me with tuition covered and $5k of spending money. There are some things about not going to MIT/CMU I'll always feel like I've missed. But there is the other side of the coin :-)