Facing potential of college debt, some UW-River Falls students opt for ROTC

Posted December 3, 2015

Editor’s note: Total student debt in the United States now tops $1.2 trillion, a financial burden that has wide implications for the economy and society. In a series of stories, student journalists of the Falcon News Service examined what student debt means at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls.

It is now considered common knowledge for college students that if they want to get a decent paying job, they need to have some sort of college degree. But with that degree comes the strenuous task of finding a way to pay for it. Some students, if they are lucky, can rely on parents to foot the bill, while others face the high stack of bills on their own.

One method some students are taking is growing in popularity as the price of tuition grows, and that is joining a branch of the military to get help paying for school. At the University of Wisconsin-River Falls that number is on the rise, with 30 students alone involved in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program.