Well you already made the decision to pay for one year of Grad School with loans. You are going to end up paying around 60-80k for that year depending on how long it takes you to pay back your loans.

Whether or not you'll be successful depends on what kind of decisions you are going to make about your career. Based on your decision to go to Penn with what appears to be no family support or financial aid, I would say you are off to kind of a bad start.

Furthermore, by accepting an offer with little or no financial aid, you are encouraging the school to continue raising it's tuition. So they can continue duping insecure middle-class people with their shiny Ivy league lapels.

I would say it's not too late to move on to something better. Assuming you are not a genius designer (most of us aren't), Architecture is not going to support you based on your demonstrated lack of financial or professional reasoning. It is a profession with high aspirations but little to no power.

First, Penn paid for half.  And I have pretty good family support in terms of the perhipherals to school.

And the encouragement for the school to raise tuition has everything to do with the availability of credit, not the individual decision of a student.

And again, this didn't address my question.   My exact problem with this kind of advice, which is everywhere on archinect--is that there is no back story to corroborate the opinion.   Did you go to school?  Are you drowning in regretted debt? Do you have an axe to grind with something in particular?  I asked for personal stories of decision making, not the same old grumbling about the system.

Really, 40K with half tuition? I'm not looking forward to grad school, its ridiculous. I think i read a NYT article on how Law Schools have quadrupled in the past 25 years inflation included.

One thing, if I may without being offensive, is that you chose to go to Penn so wasn't this expected? I mean, state schools or schools in Canada even you can get a pretty decent price, and many architects have very successful careers without the Ivy thing going on. That said, there are many many reasons Penn is a good school, and the people you meet and instructors you get are fantastic. 

I'm definitely on the borderline of getting a bargain or getting a good education as well, so I totally understand. But somehow, I'm feeling that while some people prefer to invest in a nice house or car or vacations, others prefer intellectual stimulation and a sense of accomplishment. A matter of personal interest I suppose. Where do you stand? 

You're already a third of the way in debt to getting a degree already, so my two cents would be to finish it instead of throwing out 40K down the drain. 

I hope others will comment as there are many like myself and that are curious! 

Was done with an MLA, almost quite the MArch, friends asked me ten years from now what the chances of me regretting finishing would be vs not finishing.  I chose to finish and am looking at a pretty sizable debt, but am happy to not have quite (several of my classmates did leave after the first year and seem pretty happy with their decision as they are in different fields).  For me, I wanted to be in design so I plowed through and ignored the loans.  It sucks to be in debt, but on the other hand I do feel the connections I made (made sure to get cards from my reviewers and visited their firms; I still get together with a large number of my classmates, etc) and the sense of accomplishment is enough to let me face the financial reality.

The financial advisers out there normally recommend taking out loans equivalent to one's first year salary (sounds a bit ridiculous, but most fields seem to work out that way).  Put another way, unless you have the means, your employment decisions will be heavily weighed by your debt after a few years (it's not necessarily bad, but...).

to make going to an ivy league school like Penn worth it, you need to go beyond your own portfolio.  You need to go out of your way to take advantage of the unique opportunities that Penn can offer, through alumni connections, etc.  Otherwise, it makes much more sense to go to a state school and get your degree for next to nothing, comparatively.

It sounds like you enjoy architecture as a potential career, given your brief work experience, so that is a sign that continuing might be for you.  The real world is 100% nothing like what you will be experiencing in your design studio, so dont let your first semester discourage you in that regard.  Plus, I am not sure what your undergrad was in, or where it was, but there is absolutely a first semester weed out, throw the kitchen sink at everyone to see how they respond, type of mentality at a lot of schools (I'll assume Penn included), where they just expect you to pay your dues.

I think it sounds like you just arent sure if Penn and its cost is for you.

I had a fair amount of debt from my undergrad degree, so i chose a state school which overall cost me about $5-10K for a 3 year M.Arch, which i paid as i went for the most part through part time work.  Had i pushed it, i could have gone to a higher profile school but not been taken care of financially, and to be honest, I am not the type who would have gone out of my way to find all the connections and extra benefits an ivy league offers to make that extra debt worth it

40K means 23K for school, then the rest as grad plus loans for rent/food/computer/plotting/emergencies... Penn automatically signs everyone up for a $3400 health insurance program... it adds up.  Honestly, I don't know what the financial situation of my classmates is.   They seem pretty level-headed and in touch with their own realities in any case.

Kamueku, I struggled with it quite a bit before deciding to come.  I grew up in Philadelphia, so moving here to get entrenched in a scene where I'm already willing to dedicate a lot of my life seemed natural.   And admittedly, it's too early to regret not falling in love with the institution-- 1st semester is very detached from reality everywhere.   Most of our professors are Columbia products, so I don't feel any Philadelphia connection yet.  There is plenty of representation from installation-art-branding-architecture small practices in Brooklyn. 

Likewise, some students are amazingly talented at the internalized, synthetic work they're looking for here this semester--  the things that rely on beautiful abstractions, quasi-legible diagrams, reworkings of design language to talk about *generative* constructs and programs and spaces.   Maybe I'm finding that I just don't give a shit, and then I go tuck up at night with my copy of A Pattern Language looking for some solace.  I'm finding that almost *anyone* that comes in with an attitude of righteous realism gets really pissed off first semester.   And yes, we knew what we were in for.  We're told to stick it out till we find our thing. 

It's a gamble but there's no way to know if i'm winning or losing until it's all done, which is the unsettling part.   Some days I think I'm going to stick it out and some days I think it's my last week here.  I dont get too caught up in it because there just isn't the time.   I think I just needed to hear some voices of people who are in the middle of what I would call the well-represented extremes on these forums.

my advice is to start trying to line up a summer internship at a good office.  working 3 months in a pragmatic and professional setting will help you appreciate academic idealism/naivete, and vice versa.

plus you can guage your skills against working architects and see what additional skills you'll need.

I have been in a similar situation, though not exactly.  I graduated from Penn with an M.Arch in 1991.  I entered grad school with no student loan debt, and did take out loans for Penn, 30K in total (for two years).  It has gone up quite a bit, but at that time for me that was an awful lot of money.  I am still paying it back; I have roughly $8,000 left to go.  Through my life, my student loan debt was the least of my concerns.  It was low interest and the payments were relatively small, so I just budgeted it in and paid it off slow and steady.  Even when I was really struggling I was able to pay (althoough I did defer for about as long as I could).

You are looking at 4x that, I gather, and I wouldn't say that salaries for architects have increased similarly in that period of time.  I think that's some math you need to look at. 

The other part of your story is only somewhat the same for me.  I enjoyed school, but never worked when I was in school, so when I graduated, I realized that work and school are different, and I might not actually enjoy working as an architect.  Fortunately, that wasn't the case, and I loved everything about it; still do.  I guess the point of that is that yes, school is difficult, and even work can be difficult, but if you love it, it is tolerable, and you should push through it.  If it is all about the math for you, you might be heading down the wrong path.  But if you love it, it is a great career.  Difficulties, yes, but you'll find those in any career if you are trying to finish at the top.

Much luck at Penn, and thanks to you and all who proceeded me, because you have kept our reputation strong, and enabled me to stand on that reputation.

I went to school, worked my ass off, earned a professional degree, some connections, and some solid portfolio projects I am proud of.  I worked in the field for years, even crossing off many personal goals I had set for myself.  I've seen stuff I drew on paper become physical before my eyes - an amazing feeling.  I love it.  And I hate it, because I hate the shackles of my debt.  I hate that even now, in my 30s, while I'm watching everyone around me buy houses and start families and go on vacations, I can't even afford a car.  I can't afford to do the Peace Corps.  I can't afford to work in Europe (although I received an offer and it would have been awesome - they definitely do not pay enough to young grads in Europe to cover their student loans.  Europeans don't have student loans!).  I am, still, in my 30s, one job loss away from moving in with my parents.  I have been paying down my loans for 10 years and still have years to go.  My payments are ~$500/month, on the rise, and my total debt was about $65k at graduation.  As much as I love my career field, I am currently not working in the field due to economics (aka I can make MUCH more money not being an architect).  So, if I had it all to do over again, would I?  It's hard to say, honestly.  I do not like having all of my choices in life restricted due to my debt.  Is this worth the love and passion and joy I feel when I'm designing, and talking to clients, and the smell of fresh pine 2x4s in the field, and getting the stinkeye from electricians I've just reamed for not paying attention to the electrical layout, and that moment when the client's face lights up and they tell you how much they love what you've built for them?  I don't know.  That's a tough call.  Personally my limit was $60k (approx. one year of Project Manager salary).  I can tell you for absolute certain that if it had gone much over that (like you're looking at) I would have bailed and I probably never would have regretted it.  

One thing I learn the older I get is that I feel less and less defined by whatever job I am working... and I learn more and more that architecture is a job, it is not some kind of holy calling for which we receive crowns in heaven if only we can suffer through enough.  You only live one life, and it is definitely short.  Do you want to slave it away handing your money over to a giant profit-hungry bank?  Only you can decide that one.

I *love* the work.  I can't emphasize this enough.  In my 1.5 continuous years of working, I was half-deservedly, half-serendipitously given almost full control of several small ~2500sf projects.  Got to know the city zoning people by first name.   Turned those stinkeyes from electricians into honest, respectful working relationships.  Convinced the steel benders to deliver my modular fence pieces on a Sunday.  Worked alone all night in an empty building hand-lacing the things I had designed, to meet an impossible deadline.  We got onto ArchDaily more than once.

I was certain this was the next step.  Now I'm not so sure.  What I had wasn't permanent, and certainly didn't pay enough even to keep me sustained *without* loans.  I needed to do something else.  But in terms of what i was learning about ACTUAL spatial conditions, the agency of the architect, the interdependency of all the characters integral to design, I feel like I'm taking a huge leap backwards at school, where the primary concern seems to be new forms and ideally, new ideas.  Maybe I'm just over constructing those ideas in this protected, absurdly expensive setting.

i thnk you may be rapidly approaching the point at which your level of debt really doesn't matter.  What I mean is that you can consolidate your debt and set your payments to be 10 or 15% of your discretionary income, I forget the exact %, for the next 20 years.  After 20 years the remainder is forgiven. 

Debt is the devil. Avoid it at all costs.