I don’t have to tell you that a college degree in the US is very expensive–the average cost is over $140K. But if a part of that is in the form of a loan (and for most, that is the only option), the interest on the loan can push the cost up by hundreds of thousands of dollars (you read that right) over the lifetime of repayment–and it often is over the student’s entire lifetime. So it’s not just the sticker price of college that is a concern, the mode for payment has huge implications too. 

While a college education is extremely valuable, even to the extent that it may be among the few purchases that many consider worth going into debt for, this has become distorted to practically mean: “there is virtually no limit to how much money you should borrow to get a college education.” Or, related, “there is virtually no limit to how much college should charge.” 

When considered out of context like this, each of these claims is jolting on its own, and together they make a recipe for enabling serious financial exploitation. And yet, I think it would be difficult to argue that something close to those two claims is not part of the American collective understanding of college pricing and payment–college pricing and borrowing structures reflect these, and in practice, students attending college enact these claims. In other words, colleges keep charging–and students keep paying–more and more. But as the student loan crisis is showing, there are devastating consequences.

Newlane is a great option to earn a debt free college degree. 

Here is how Newlane works: We don’t offer student loans–there is no student loan office. Newlane students do not complete a FAFSA. Rather we are priced at a price point that doesn’t require students to borrow funds. Students pay a registration fee of $249, then they pay $39 until they reach $1500 for their degree. That’s it. This is a price that is manageable for most of the world. Again, this is by design. The first tenet of our manifesto reads: 

Education should be available and accessible to every person on earth; making quality education inaccessible or exclusive is immoral. Education belongs in the same category as shelter, clean water, and basic food.

Importantly, Newlane is not a charity. In a strange sort of way, approaching education as a charity has fed into the claims cited earlier–that there is virtually no limit to how much a college should charge for an education. In a climate where we treat education as a charity, or routinely have a portion of education subsidized by someone else, or some other group, it is easy to mask excessive charges. We don’t offer a debt free college degree because your education is subsidized by a generous benefactor. We don’t offer a debt free college degree because we are a lower quality degree. We offer a debt free college degree because we have a better model, optimized for a world where abundant access to high quality educational resources is the norm. And within this model, $1500 is a fair price. And since students can pay as they go, they don’t need to get a loan to get an education.

Newlane charges $1500/degree. For a Bachelor’s degree, this includes an Associate degree for $1500, in addition to the major course work and elective credits for $1500. So a Newlane Bachelor’s degree from start to finish is $3000. If a student has already earned an Associate degree, they would just focus on the remaining credits for the Bachelor’s degree, and they would only need to pay $1500 for the Bachelor’s degree. Learn more about Newlane University’s debt free college degree offerings.