Financing your music school education

[pedro]

I'm not sure if this is the right section to post this question but here goes.

Many of you are in music school now or have been recently. We've looked at many, many schools and from what I can tell all of them are really expensive - mostly $30+ per year. With no scholarships or grants that would leave a recent graduate w/ a debt of $120,000 or more upon graduation. Here are my questions:

1. Going in, what did you decide was an acceptable level of student debt and how did you arrive at that number?

2. Where did you ultimately decide to go and why? What was the 'full cost of attendance'?

3. In deciding where you wanted to go to school, how important was the financial offers to your decision making process?