How can I pay for it?

Jennifer McMahon: Try to avoid paying if at all possible. Graduate school is not cheap and professional salaries are not in the six-digits. In short, it isn’t easy to pay back student debt as an assistant professor. Actively pursue graduate/teaching assistantships. Remember, in the graduate sector, financial aid is not typically needs based. Instead, it is merit based. Know too that you can reapply on an annual basis for funding. Not everyone who gets in gets money; however, often some people with graduate assistantships quit along the way. This leaves financial lines open for the taking. Thus, if you don’t get money in the first year, you should consider that year a period in which you can prove to the department that you deserve an assistantship. This means you have to ace your classes and be a responsible departmental citizen (e.g., go to lectures, help faculty, volunteer to tutor). This approach will almost be mandated for students with marginal academic records because the university is taking a risk to just admit you. They are unlikely to give you money right away.

Teresa Rothrock: When I started my master’s in comp/rhet at OU, I had a graduate assistantship. Thereafter, I was a working professional, which made it harder, if not nigh-impossible, to qualify for other scholarships and fellowships. Many of my cohorts in graduate school, however, paid for or supplemented their expenses through large and small scholarships and grants, but I just couldn’t juggle the paperwork to apply nor the regimen to comply, if accepted—not with a full time job that was a commute away from my graduate school. So, I paid for most of mine, directly or with student loans. I figured the raise I got for completing my degree makes up for (barely) the expense of paying back the loans. Most importantly, it affords me a professional lifestyle that suits me.

Steve Benton: I went into debt to complete a one-year master’s degree program at the University of Chicago on a half-scholarship and that opened the door for me to be admitted to several Ph.D. programs that offered me free tuition, fellowships (which pay you to attend class full-time) and teaching assistantships. Even the best fellowships and teaching assistantships are still extremely low-paying gigs, however. It is only because my wife had a good, full-time job through my graduate school years that I was able to graduate without debt and we were ably to live in relative comfort while I was in the mine.

Josh Grasso: Get a teaching assistantship or graduate asstantship. As long as you have decent grades (over 3.2 GPA), get strong recommendation letters, submit strong writing samples, and have reasonable expectations (don't apply only to ivy league schools), you have a great chance of getting one. They take care of your tuition AND give you a stipend to boot. Again, if a program doesn't offer you a TA but lets you in anyway, be careful: they will often give you a year to prove yourself, but still won't guarantee a TA (this happened to a friend of mine--they never offered her one). You can easily go broke this way. Unless you HAVE to go to this school, try someplace else. You don't need more debt, and there are plenty of good schools out there.