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Comment by Asparagirl | Hacker News Reader

There was no mention in this article of Lin-Manuel Miranda (who won a MacArthur genius grant in 2015), but he reported on Twitter at the time that he had used his grant to pay off his and his wife's student loans.

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Maybe because they covered one case of a grantee repaying their $180k(!) student loan.

The doesn't seem all that large for someone with a professional degree, like a M.D. or J.D. America is the land of the free until you get to university.

Really? This is an incredible amount IMO, regardless of profession. That is a massive amount of debt that can't ever be absolved without paying, and an incredible amount of interest.

I just looked it up and according to a nerdwallet survey (highly unscientific) the average debt for new physician is $166,000.

That's lower than I would have guessed.

It seems like a tremendous amount when you consider that the amount of prestige "BigLaw" jobs that can shoulder that debt burden are a fairly small portion of the average graduating cohort's employment.

In contrast, I completed my professional degree and a masters in law at the two best universities in my country for a total out of pocket tuition cost of approximately $9,000. That's around 1.3 orders of magnitude apart.

I'm sure there will be replies about the quality of the alumni networks or the level of scholarship (which would be very poorly founded), but that misses the point: the magnitude of debt is shocking.

One year before he made multiple hundreds of millions of dollars with Hamilton.

did he actually make that much or are you guessing? :-)

i'm sure he's doing well, but the play business is a tricky one and never that large, afaik. i'm sure he's well positioned tho!

Interesting, this Time article says he made about $6M from the Broadway production in 2016, out of a $100M gross.

http://time.com/money/4362742/hamilton-cast-earnings-lin-man...

I would have thought you'd make a lot more money for creating such a huge cultural force, but I suppose the economics of live theater don't scale much no matter how popular you are.

I'm sure he made a pretty penny from the Moana soundtrack though

That’s just from the production in 2016. It will make more in 2017 and for a decade, plus the album (#12 on Billboard) plus the book (top seller on Amazon) plus the merchandise and eventual stage film.

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