These stories talk about the load of student debt.
A $1T industry leveraged against the earning potential of America's graduate and undergraduate students. They and their parents borrow tens of thousands of dollars, anticipating fruitful careers and smooth payback plans. But those plans can be quickly derailed.
By Andria Tieman
I am 34 years old and I have more student loan debt than I can ever pay off. As much as I regret the six-figure number I owe, I can’t regret having to take out the loans because I am actually exactly where I wanted to be, career-wise. It’s a catch-22, but the deed is done, and I’m living with the consequences. So, how does this happen to a sensible girl from the Midwest? I’m the daughter of a banker and a financial planner who should have known better and I kind of did, but I also needed the degrees I have to get the job I wanted.
Beginning at the beginning, I grew up in a small town in the upper Midwest—30 minutes from Canada. Most people who are not from that region have no idea how small a town can be. I graduated from high school in a class of 66 people, and that was the largest graduating class in ten years.
Because I grew up in such a small town, there were no AP classes at my school. There were few chances to take cheaper college classes through a community college and there was no chance of graduating a year early so I could spend a year working and saving before going to college. I did work part-time jobs in high school, usually more than one at a time, but saving up enough for college tuition while making $4.75/hour seemed like an insurmountable goal.
Eventually I set off for a state school and was lucky enough that my parents agreed to pay the first four years of tuition. The problem was, I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life or major in. I had always been told that it didn’t necessarily matter what you majored in as long as you had a degree, but upon graduating it seemed that my BA in English was not much of a qualification for anything. I always knew I wanted to be a writer, but I was sensible enough to know that I needed a real job with a steady source of income while trying to build my portfolio.
After graduating after five and half years of just trying to come up with a life plan, I decided to go to grad school. After all, that’s what you do when you aren’t ready to be a grownup, right? Despite the fact that I picked this plan on a whim, it ended up being the best thing I could have done. Yes, my MFA was not a career making degree, but it challenged me, forced me to grow up, made me a better writer, squashed my ego and gave me a bit of clarity.
My stated purpose for getting the MFA was to work in publishing and indeed the school that I went to was one of two in the nation that actually owned a publishing company. I got firsthand experience working with authors, fact checking, editing etc., but what I learned in doing so, was that I was not very good at most of that. I gamely applied for a few jobs, but my heart wasn’t in it and I got no responses.
So I needed a new plan. While in college and grad school, I had worked at Barnes & Noble. I actually enjoyed many aspects of that job, but didn’t want to make it a career. I also considered continuing grad studies and being a professor, but watching friends and fellow grad students adjunct at three different schools earning a small amount per class, I realized that that was also probably not a sustainable career option for me.
I decided to become a librarian, which required me to get another masters degree. Unfortunately, there are only about 65 Master of Library and Information Sciences programs in the US, Canada and Puerto Rico, and none of them were within regional tuition distance from me. This was in the very early days of online education, so that wasn’t much of an option either. I took the GRE, applied to two programs on the other side of the country, and ended up moving to Rhode Island. I had saved up enough money before moving to pay rent and feed myself, but not enough to pay tuition, so I took out more loans for that.
In the meantime, I had taken out loans already for five semesters of graduate school, and though tuition was far less than the maximum loan award, I took it all and used it to pay off credit card debt. $10,000 x five semesters equals $50,000. But by going back to school, I was able to stop the interest clock on half of those loans (the subsidized ones), and I tried to pay the interest on the others when I got the quarterly statements.
My second masters degree - since it was out of state tuition - wasn’t even completely covered by taking out the maximum amount of loans per semester. After borrowing another $40,000 for four semesters of tuition, the economy bottomed out and library jobs became next-to-impossible to find. I managed to land a 19-hour-a-week position that barely covered my living expenses, but loan payments were completely out of the question at that point so the interest just piled on.
Eventually, I got another 20-hour-a-week position and was able to start making small payments, but by that point the amount owed had ballooned to $100,000 and even with paying more than the amount owed per month, the accruing interest was outpacing anything I could actually pay. I started the strategy of paying more on the biggest, highest interest loan, and that has the principal actually going down. However, in the last year, I have paid over $6500 toward my loans, and the amount owed has only gone down by $2000. A lot of that has to do with the fact that my loans were sold to an outside vender, and it took them six months to set me up again for repayment. During that time, I had no one I could make payments to, so the loans grew like the blob when it gobbled up another body.
Many of my friends think it’s ridiculous that I’m even trying to pay back these loans because I work for a qualified non-profit so they’ll be forgiven in ten years anyway, but I can’t predict the future and I can’t really bank on that. Also, the way the law is written at present, forgiven loans count as income, which is taxed, and I certainly can’t afford that. It’s robbing Peter to pay Paul, but I borrowed the money knowing that I would have to pay it back, so I’m obliged to at least try.
I really do wonder what life would be like without this huge scythe hanging over my head. I think about my student loans daily; I hem and haw about whether to put money into savings or retirement instead of paying more on my loans. I don’t have children, I don’t own property and I know that I would never be approved for a home loan because my debt to income ratio is so insane. I also would probably not save enough for a down payment because looking at money sitting in savings makes me feel guiltier about not making an extra loan payment that month.
I have a very good job now doing exactly what I wanted to do. I actually have my dream job, which is something not many people can say, and I was uniquely qualified for it because of my particular degrees, so I can’t regret getting them. I still feel like I can’t completely enjoy my success though because taking on that much debt seems like such a stupid thing to have done.
By Tanya Rose
My name is Tanya Rose, and I have student debt.
This is the part where people are supposed to tell me it’s OK, that I shouldn’t feel ashamed – after all, a pricey college education and the debt that comes along with it, well, that’s the American Way.
But the truth is, I am worried and a bit ashamed. Part of that might have to do with my parents (I remember my mom quietly saying, “Now honey, don’t tell your grandma that you’re taking out loans – she wouldn’t approve.”) But most of it is my disposition – I am a walking combination of worry, Catholic guilt and OCD perfectionism.
While I don’t owe tens of thousands of dollars the way some do, what I owe is enough to keep me up at night plotting, calculating, yearning for the day when I don’t have to send that check every month.
I wasn’t always this skittish. I was like a lot of kids – carefree in my assumption that I’d be raking it in by 30, so who cares? “Another $5,000 while I study for the bar exam? Yes please!”
I still remember the exact day – the exact moment, actually – when I set all this in motion. I was 17, about to graduate high school and I was sitting on the hood of my parents’ Oldsmobile thinking about my future. I had already decided to go to the University of Kansas to study journalism.
But that day, I had read an article in Newsweek (my dream publication, where I would one day be a star reporter) and it changed everything. It was about the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill sexual harassment scandal, and at the bottom, there was a bio box about the writer. It turns out, so and so was a lawyer. Who wrote stories. Good stories. A lawyer. (Funny that this guy changed my life, and I can’t remember his name).
Sitting on the hood of my parents’ car, I decided that I would go to law school – that would set me apart from my writing peers, right? Then my ample Newsweek salary would take care of any and all law school loans, and I would be set for life.
Only that’s not what happened. I graduated from undergrad, with honors, in 1996, and then law school in 1999. Then I got my first job working for the Orange County Register, making $24,000 a year. “This is just how it is at first,” I remember thinking. “It won’t be forever.”
Then I went on to the Tracy Press making a little more. Then the Contra Costa Times, here in the Bay Area, making around $50,000.
It has been 13 years since I graduated from law school, and I never got to Newsweek – probably because my priorities shifted and it turned out I absolutely loved being a newspaper reporter. But after 12 years in the industry, I hadn’t progressed financially the way I thought I would.
Instead of skyrocketing upward, I was an ink-stained snail, happy but poor, with the knowledge that at some point, the gig would be up and I’d have to move on.
I am now doing public relations for a major Bay Area company, and I make a lot more than my journalism days, thank the Lord. I’m now able to pay off large chunks of my loans, but it’s not fun, and it’s not what I expected that day when I was a teenager, when the world stood before me, rife with opportunity.
According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, college tuition has gone up 7.45 percent per year since 1978. That means college costs four times more than it did 20 years ago, and 20 years from now, tuition could be as high as $250,000. Meanwhile, scholarships and grants are being slashed left and right. Salaries, sad to say, are not progressing at the same rate.
These days, if you want to go to Stanford Law, at $45,000 a year, and then work for your dream non-profit, God help you.
It’s easy to say that students should be better informed about what they’re in for, but I’m thinking that if someone came up to me at 17 and said, “Be careful. It’s not easy to pay all that back,” I am guessing I would have ignored it, pompous as I was, and do things exactly the same way.
I am stressed, yes. But I will say that I am glad I went to law school. It was one of the richest, most satisfying times of my life, where my sole goal was to feed my brain. I guess each person just has to decide if it’s worth it.
On my deathbed, when I’m completely square with our government and all that worry is in the past, I’m sure I’ll be glad that I walked this earth as an educated person. So I say thank you to that Newsweek lawyer, whoever he was.
By Kristin Wong
In my elementary school Texas history class, we learned that many of the States' first American colonists were debtors. People moved to the sweltering, mosquito-riddled republic in order to escape their creditors back in the home. In its early days, Texas was an awful place, filled with danger, discomfort and war.
Today, Texas isn't a whole lot better. If you've ever suffered through a Houston summer - your thighs melting to your car's upholstery, your armpits dripping like a leaky faucet - you know it isn't the most comfortable place to live. No one vacations in Texas. For the most part, no one raves about the views or the weather. With some exceptions, the only incentive for moving to a place like Texas is, usually, a monetary one. Yet I found myself moving back there in an attempt to be resourceful, and couldn't shake the feeling that in some ways I, too, was like a spendthrift settler of Texas history.
Frustration set in when I graduated in 2005 with about $12,000 worth of student loan debt. These days, that may be a mere drop in the bucket for some students, but back when I was earning less than ten bucks an hour, $12,000 seemed overwhelming. I knew had to start somewhere, and fast.
Luckily, I found a salaried job by early 2006 and things were going well. I became good friends with my new co-workers, who even invited me on vacations. They also regularly went out to restaurants, clubs, bars, and concerts. Sometimes I joined them, but each time could feel the pressure of that pesky $12,000 weighing on me. A twenty-five dollar plate of fresh sushi just doesn't taste as good when you know you can't really afford it. Within a few months, frustration turned into feeling oppressed, and my debt was ruling my life.
By 2007, two great things happened. First, my student loan had dwindled to $6,000. In less than a year, I'd paid off half of my debt. My job wasn't great, but I proved that the old, "live below your means," adage really does work. Second, around this time, I'd been offered a new job: one that paid nearly twice as much as my previous job. I figured if I maintained my current lifestyle, I could probably pay off my loan in six more months.
However, for the first time I was earning enough money to buy things I'd always wanted: new clothes, a chic apartment. At one point, I considered to myself, "I'll just pay the minimum and enjoy life a little." Still, I somehow knew that, "enjoy now, pay later," wasn't working out very well for a hell of a lot of Americans. So I decided to try the opposite: "pay now, enjoy later." So I kept going.
Then, I became a little depressed. Six more months of holding back? Not enjoying the money I earn? I'm young! I want to live, already! If only there was a way to pay off my debt sooner, I thought, so I could start living the life I wanted.
But during my debt repayment journey, I learned to be resourceful. That resourcefulness helped me realize there was an opportunity to pay off my debt faster. Frustrating as it was, I resolved to join my friends less and less often. I turned down tropical trips in favor of paying off my debt. I'm still not sure where the will power came from, but it was there.
Finally, I moved to a place I wasn't particularly fond of, a place that was kind of oppressive and not very comfortable: my parents' house in Texas.
It was a bit of a sacrifice, but I saw it as a get-out-of-debt opportunity. Sure, many people don't think of moving in with your parents as much of a sacrifice. To them, I'll simply say: you don't know my parents. I love them, but 2007 was a rough time for all of us, and our family was going through some difficulties. It wasn't the easiest time to live together, but I toughed it out and in a few short months, paid off all of my student debt.
In the seven years that have passed, I moved to a nice apartment in Los Angeles, traveled the world several times and even switched careers. I can't attribute all of that to paying off my debt in a year, but it's probably safe to say it helped. The frustration and oppression of debt was difficult. That's why I wanted it to be over as quickly as possible.
Not everyone can move in with their parents. Not everyone can live below their means or find a better paying job. But sometimes opportunities arise in unlikely places, and it takes resolve to see those possibilities.
Our economy hasn't fared very well with the, "enjoy now, pay later" mentality, nor is a lifetime of delayed gratification a favorable alternative. Maybe it's just a matter of comproimse to view the situation differently and, "pay now, enjoy sooner." While debt can take a toll, it is far from insurmountable with a lot of willpower and just a little resourcefulnesss.
By Ken Ilgunas
I thought of student debt like I thought of death: I didn’t think of it all. As a 21-year-old college student, I had a long life and bright future ahead of me. Why should I worry myself sick over gloomy inevitabilities? Best to shove worries of my $32,000 debt to the back of my mind alongside other yet-to-be-grown-up concerns, like paying a mortgage, finding good day care, and growing skin tags.
I had little desire to leave college. As a history student, I loved the thrill of a stimulating lecture, the long, caffeinated nights writing papers and outrageous columns for my campus newspaper, the pretty girls, and, above all, the feeling that I was “growing,” which reassured me that, whether my degree was marketable or not, college was where I needed to be. I resented having to leave academe and toil in Career World while my fellow students would continue to thrive in graduate school.
Despite having been an editor at my college newspaper, all 25 of my applications to paid journalism internships were rejected. I began to feel desperate: It struck me that maybe I wasn’t going to be able to pay off my debt after all. I’d heard of students who’d spent years, decades, lifetimes (!) paying off their student loans, and I’d heard of others who couldn’t make their payments, afflicted with scary-sounding things like forbearance, deferment, and default.
Without a better idea, I wound up calling a friend, who hooked me up with a $9-an-hour job as a tour guide in Coldfoot, Alaska, 60 miles north of the Arctic Circle and 250 miles from the nearest stoplight. Coldfoot, the world’s northernmost truck stop, has a winter population of 12 that triples during the summer, when buses drop off their cargo of tourists at Coldfoot’s 52-room motel. I would be one of three guides who’d take the tourists on daylong tours in a 14-passenger van up the Dalton Highway or in a big blue raft down the sleepy Koyukuk River.
The job was repetitive and the hours grueling, but I knew I wasn’t the only college graduate who’d had to sacrifice to pay bills. Plus, I was happy just to have a job. Yet I’d never hated my debt more. I was working for a pittance, often for as many as 70 hours a week. After work, I rarely had any energy to read or write, and the mental muscles I’d worked so hard to strengthen in college were atrophying from disuse.
Coldfoot offered free room and board, and I had no expenses to speak of, but I was paying off my debt at a troublingly slow rate. I’d have to live like this for years, I thought. For the foreseeable future, my life would be little more than punch cards and jobs in places with prisonlike male-to-female ratios. The student debt was a ball and chain, restraining me from experiencing what I wanted more than anything: unfettered freedom, which I hoped to use to go to graduate school.
Toward the end of the season, I’d gotten the hang of guiding, and each night I brought back to my dorm handfuls of tips, stashing the bills under my mattress. By summer’s end, I was sleeping on top of $3,000.
It was then that I began to realize that I was getting a very different education than I’d gotten in college. Jeffrey Williams, in his illuminating essay “The Pedagogy of Debt,” says the university experience teaches students that debt is not something to be avoided, but normal and expected; it’s how things are done. To buy something, we learn to swipe our credit or college ID card and worry about the bill later. Policies like compulsory campus housing and ridiculously priced dining plans force students to go deeply into debt. And, most tragically, the university experience influences how we think about and handle money for the rest of our lives. College does not teach us to save, live frugally, or work our way through school. It teaches us how to be debtors.
Now that I was on my own, in a precarious financial situation, far removed from my old consumer-driven lifestyle, I was learning how to save, how to radically cut back on expenses, and that it didn’t make sense to pay tens of thousands of dollars for something I couldn’t afford—things I wished I’d known before enrolling in college.
Over the course of the summer, between my tips and paycheck, I managed to save $8,000. Not eager to give up my steady wage, I decided to spend the rest of the year in Coldfoot, now as a line cook at the trucker’s café. The winter work crew was largely made up of desperate, carnie-like drifters, who brought to mind a mostly fun-loving, sometimes sinister, and always sketchy gang of thieves. Among them were a schizophrenic dishwasher, a compulsive liar, a “cutter,” a pair of alcoholic carpenters, and a trio of grunts, who, when on some undisclosed narcotic, found satisfaction in surreptitiously defecating on the roofs of coworkers’ cars.
Gone were the days of lectures and seminars, of leafy campus lawns and elbow-patched professors. I was now daily exposed to alcoholism and drug addiction, beer-bellied truckers, and steel-toe boots in 30-below weather.
One night a week, I got to lead an “aurora tour,” on which I’d drive Japanese guests up the road to a spot where we could get a clean view of the northern lights. With the tourists, I’d stand beneath a sky lit up with spumes of reds, pinks, and greens that swooped, twisted, and curled into each other, a glowing, throbbing curtain of color.
When gazing into the aurora, or standing alone on a mountaintop, or even working alongside my deranged, possibly homicidal coworkers, I’d feel the jolt of a direct, raw encounter with the world—a wild richness of being—and I was happy I wasn’t embalmed in some stuffy Ph.D. program somewhere. The embarrassment of being a burger-flipper with a college degree at a far-flung truck stop turned into, well, pride. And I began to think that striving for a degree, a career, or a big wage ought to be secondary to striving for something as simple as a story to tell.
I left Coldfoot in the spring, having paid off more than half my student debt. From there, I hitchhiked more than 8,000 miles across the country, taking jobs wherever the wind blew me. I worked on an AmeriCorps trail crew in Mississippi, delivered packages alongside a homophobic UPS truck driver in Denver, and moved back up to Coldfoot to work as a back-country ranger for the Park Service, where, after two and a half years of work, I finally paid off my debt.
Over the course of my journey, I realized that it was only half an education to have the university without the universe—or the universe without the university. And while I’d at first resented having to leave school to work, I came to believe that a true student would greet any situation as a discipline worthy of study, and that, whether in the classroom or on the open road, as Seneca said, “there is only one really liberal study—that which gives a man his liberty.”
By Allie Warren
Our family’s journey to get out of debt really started the beginning of this year in January. I say “really started” because we’ve tried starting this journey a few times over the last few years and never followed through. To get out of debt is hard, as I’m sure anyone who has tried (or even thought about it) knows. I think when most people sit down and look at their debt, it overwhelms them and causes hopelessness. We were slightly overwhelmed but hopeful. We knew then it was possible because we had heard success stories through Dave Ramsey’s radio show. It was just a matter of putting our foot down and saying enough is enough. We wanted the financial freedom that all those other people had.
We started this year (2013) in debt, a little shy of $60,000. This included 11 student loans ($46,417.52) and 2 car payments ($12,859.47). The first thing my husband and I did was create a budget, accounting for every dollar. I think the word “budget” to the majority of the population has a negative connotation. “Budget” can be a dirty word and that’s exactly how it started out in our household. I used to try to avoid doing the finances with my husband. The same question would come up when we would attempt to talk about finances.
“What did you buy that you spent that much money?”
It would end with both us being upset, but for different reasons.
It wasn’t until we did our first monthly budget that we finally got a reality check on how much money was going to junk. Our first try was a little bit of a bust. We missed a few things we forgot we had to budget for, but it was a valuable learning experience. The next month, February 2013, was a lot better. And so were our attitudes.
I think one important thing that we have learned through this journey is that it requires sacrifice. It has been a hard year but I can say that, so far, it has been worth it. My husband had to give up his annual baseball trip and for me there was no spa weekend with my mom. It has been life changing, maybe a little different for me than for my husband because I do all the grocery shopping and basically any household buying.
I remember I used to drop $100+ at Target every trip, which I’m sure any woman can identify with. It wasn’t usually spent on anything important. I remember my first trip there on a budget. I started to pick up an item I didn’t need, and something clicked. I knew I didn’t need it and couldn’t afford, so I put it back. It has gotten easier as the months have gone by to say “no.” That's the magic word while staying true to your budget, “NO.”
My motivation: the fact that I am creating a better and secure future for my children. Plus, we are almost 11 months into our journey and we down to owing $24,175.51 of the $59,276.99!
