The high cost of attending NYU is hardly breaking news. The school has been known for charging high tuition for years, and its track record for providing financial aid isn't great: As CBS reported earlier this summer, only three percent of NYU students get their full financial needs met by the school. (Compare that to Columbia University, also in Manhattan, which meets the full financial needs of all its students.) Comparatively speaking, New York has always been an expensive city. The high composite cost of an education at NYU is almost common knowledge. And the decision to finance such a costly education, whether personally or with loans, is a choice. A choice I certainly made. So it raises the question: Who's responsible for the debt?

Though I graduated from the school this past spring with a BA in literature, I am not an apologist for NYU. I think giving some faculty members loans for vacation homes is unsavory.* The list of objections goes on: I think plans for expansion in Greenwich Village are invasive, the satellite campuses in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai are unnecessary extravagances, and institutional bureaucracy borders on comical cliché. But as Zac Bissonnette, author of Debt-Free U, wrote in 2011: "NYU students have a legitimate concern--the amount of money that they're borrowing is insane--and the way that they should handle it is to vote with their feet. Transfer to another school. Deprive NYU of its source of revenue and save yourself in the process."

So am I, as an alum of NYU, in some way culpable for the corporatization of the university? By staying through graduation, am I complicit in the out-of-control rise in tuition, the school's ascendancy as the number-one producer of student debt?

"I don't think the school holds all the accountability," says a recent graduate of NYU's music business program. "My mom took out all of my loans in both of our names, but we never discussed how much I was going to owe until now. So it's parents who are at fault, too. And high schools need to offer some sort of tuition counseling before the fact."

I asked her if, looking back, she thinks her 18-year-old self was mature enough to be making such definitive financial decisions. "Absolutely not," she said with a laugh. "But at the same time, if someone had told me I would owe as much as I do, I don't think it would have changed my mind. I was a senior in high school. Everything at that age is so dramatic and romanticized. You're thinking, 'I can't put a price tag on my future.'"

That feeling, she says, bleeds into the first few years of college. "When you're in that culture, freshman and sophomore year, everyone's just excited to be there. You don't think it's ever going to end, but then it's senior year. You hit that quarter-life crisis, and you realize you actually have to pay for it all."