L yss Ricciardi says within five minutes of stepping onto the Dickinson College campus in Pennsylvania, "I knew that I was meant to be here."

Her heart was set on the private school, even though it would entail owing more than $30,000 in student loans by the time she graduated in May, she says.

"I’m not super happy about it, but I knew what I was getting into," Ricciardi says. She expects to incur $22,000 more in loans during graduate school at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, where she is in her first year of a master’s program in forensic psychology.

By the time she finishes graduate school in 2027, she’ll owe more than $50,000.

Ricciardi says she thinks of money as "a renewable resource," that most of her friends have loans, too, and she expects to be able to pay

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