You've been tricked into an inappropriate lifestyle ----- And the student loan companies did it. Their motivation is the positively insane interest rates for loans which cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. You are their cash cow. You are doing exactly what they want. Money is distributive. Money spent on something else is not spent on tuition, which requires more student loan. When you buy an $80 cell phone plan ($960/year) that is $960 not put toward tuition, which must necessarily be an additional $960 on the student loan at 9.3%. Would you intentionally borrow for 7 years at 9.3% to get that phone? Of course not. And yet, *you are* because money is distributive. And you don't realize that. And it isn't anyone else's job to know that. **It's yours**. But there isn't good *financial education* in this country, because the finance business makes more money when people are in the dark. Suze Orman and Dave Ramsey just can't out-shout the system. More's the pity; a well-educated populace is more successful *generally*, and a rising economic tide floats most boats. (Not the corrupted ones). Worse, this is "setting in" financial *habits* you will retain for your entire life. You feel like a victim now!? Fasten your seat belt. It gets worse unless you turn this crazytrain around. What college is supposed to be ----- College is supposed to be a desperate hardscrabble... Working a summer job, ha, try working an *evening* job! A pizza slice is a weekly indulgence. Movie? Ha! Netflix? And you're very busy so you don't have much time to commisserate about your miserable life. Students are supposed to do scrappy things like - know who sells ramen packets six for $1 instead of 20 cents - forget cell phone, get an iPad Mini with cellular data, a $25 per 3 months data plan, Google Voice and a Bluetooth. - Not even getting Internet/phone/cable at home, confine surfing to the school WiFi. - Housemate sharing to extremes. Own apartment!? Yeah, after the student loans are paid down. - Work a night job. *Work two*. - Car? Laughable. Even delivery jobs or Uber can't make car ownership better than a loser's game. There's a reason pizza delivery guys drive '93 Geos. Otherwise you rely on your school's provided transit pass. And you don't really have time to go places, with all the jobs. Now along come the student loan hawkers, and they say (in essence) "You don't need to do all that jazz. You can just have *us* pay all your chargeable student expenses, and keep all your earned money for lifestyle." **And boy, that's seductive, isn't it!!** Play to your advantages ----- Don't even think of quitting Drexel. It is a *great* school and your choice of career will let you print money later. Gosh, you're making me want to go there myself. You go to school at the perfect-storm intersection of extreme transitability and sanely priced housing. **Your school is blocks from 30th St. Station**, not in freeway hell like UTexas/San Antonio. Your city is sanely priced to live in, not nosebleed expensive like [Berkeley][1]. So there is no conceivable reason to be needing a car. If your workplace is somewhere stupidly non-transitable, and I mean "stupidly" because transit in Philly is so good you have a good collection of employers located along it, particularly when 30th is the best hub in town. So change jobs if you need to. You can try #VanLife if you really, really are addicted to automobiles, but that sounds hard in the winter, and I think if you do an honest, searching study of **all** your automobile costs, I think you will find your TCO for the automobile is larger than the cost of modest housemate-share + transit. Which means the automobile is stupid. You definitely need to cut car or housing. Cut it ------ You just need to be merciless about expenses like that. That apartment, I don't know where it is, maybe you chose a location that *requires* a car, but if so you gotta break that lease (do the effort of listing and showing, the landlord will probably let you out at negligible cost, mine did). If you are in fact near Drexel, housemate shares [look to be][2] $500ish, so get one or become one. You need to murder that living expense down to about $800/month, notably by killing the car, unless you want to drive Uber at night. You should be getting over $4000/mo. from the engineering job and basically every dollar of that should go to tuition, to either pay off or avert student loans. Also, you will need a night job. From there, it's school, job, and ramen. Sucks, but **that's what school is**. Well, that's what *personal responsibility* is. The loan hawkers would much prefer you do the other thing, in which case you will be their slave. That is literally the plot of *Pinnochio*, by the way, "Pleasure Mountain" being the lifestyle to which you have become accustomed. [1]: https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/eby/roo?query=berkeley&availabilityMode=0 [2]: https://philadelphia.craigslist.org/search/roo?query=drexel&availabilityMode=0