“Whatever happens around you, don’t take it personally… Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves.”
― Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom
You’ve probably noticed that if you bring up your student loan debt, people start to get visibly uncomfortable. If you start to get specific about your student loan debt some people will get nasty. Pretty soon you’ll hear things like “I bet you didn’t spend all that money on your education.” “My generation worked to pay for school, today’s kids don’t want to work.”
You know what these thoughts represent? The uncomfortable reality that college is more expensive now than ever.
The American Dream is built on the idea that any individual can have a picturesque life if they are willing to work for it. The American dream is built on meritocracy. My generation is invalidating meritocracy because of one unshakable reality, student loan debt.
The historic school of thought that you can “work to pay for college” doesn’t apply for many. Here’s the data driven statistic that stops that myth dead.
Today a student at a four year public institution has to work 51 hours per week at minimum wage to afford tuition and fees plus room and board. In 1980 a student had to work 22 hours per week at minimum wage to afford the same thing.
Sources 1,2,3
That’s an increase of 29 hours each week!
My assumption is that many of the folks saying their generation “had the work ethic to pay for school” have worked 40 hours a week for the duration of their careers. Yet if previous generations believe today’s students should “work to pay for school” then they’re mandating an additional 11 hours per week above the standard 40 hour work week and expecting students to put in those extra hours on top of a full-time schedule of classes.
Objectively, the student loan burden just doesn’t add up to an issue of work ethic, and that makes people uncomfortable. I mean shit, if America can’t blame the work ethic of a generation for suffocating student loan debt there might be a problem to deal with. If America accepts these statistics, we have to own the fact that we’re bankrupting future generations trying to obtain the American Dream through education.
Rather than face the problem head on, America pulls out more tools in the accusatory arsenal to shift blame.
“Well I’m sure you didn’t use all that money to pay for college.” becomes a handy weapon. Perhaps the spring break a borrower took at the age of 20 explains why they can’t buy a house at 30. If America can shame borrowers enough that will silence the problem.
But alas, the pesky facts won’t be silenced.
“The average annual price tag for tuition and fees plus room and board at a public four year institution is over $17,000 yet students annually borrowed an average of $7,000 to pay for that expense.”
Sources 4,5
That means students are finding ways to come up with over $10,000 a year for higher education. This statistic doesn’t line up with wasted money on spring break and lavish spending as the source of our problem.
So what is it then that gives America such disdain for borrowers? It surely isn’t reality and objective data. If Americans based their comments on data we’d be saying things like “Today’s graduates are expected to pay more for college while making less money.” or “Despite limiting spending to only tuition and books plus room and board, today’s graduates will need to come up with $76,000 to pay for a four year degree at a public university.”
Higher education is one way to secure the American dream. Federal funding, like student loans, makes access to college widespread and less dependent on a family’s earnings. But the cost is upsetting Americans, because student loans have become an unshakable burden for some graduates and are impeding the way to the American dream through education.
There’s something about the promise of a college graduate. All across America twenty-somethings full of hope, ambition, ideas, and skills are heading into the world to change it. It’s inspiring! One of them could change life as we know it! They could cure cancer, they could genetically engineer a bacteria to metabolize plastic and eliminate plastic pollution, graduates’ possibilities are endless and it’s so refreshing.
The promise of America’s future is so reassuring because that means the mistakes of the past don’t have to persist indefinitely. We can right our wrongs.
This is where student loan debt comes in and produces fear. Instead of seeing bright-eyed, ambitious, problem-solving graduates with the world at their fingertips, America sees twenty-somethings unable to afford rent and moving in with their parents. America sees ambition being trampled as borrowers make decisions based on their debt that don’t line up with the traditional American dream. How can the future be better when it’s innovators are preoccupied with basic financial needs?
Who wants to buy a house while struggling to pay off a mortgage worth of student loans?
Who can create a better future while paying for the past?
Enter the American consciousness, gnawing away at historical beliefs that the dream can be attained through education. The headlines tell America that young people are financially worse off than previous generations. But how can that be? The same system that’s crushing today’s borrowers empowered our parents.
So America presumes the problem lies with borrowers today. America presumes the student loan debt problem is brought about by wrongdoing of the generation feeling stuck. America presumes that the lack of ambition is the cause of the student loan debt problem rather than the symptom.
And so the attacks begin, to relentlessly protect America’s worldview and belief that the American dream can truly be obtained by anyone who works for it. If millions of borrowers think they’re going to disrupt the American dream with a whiny ass lack of work ethic, think again.
America will viciously defend the view that our country fosters the success of unlikely heroes rather than breeding underdogs in the first place.
I’m a borrower who took out $118,000 in federal student loans to obtain my Pharm.D. Because of interest, I ended up with $132,000 of student loan debt. I share this story all the time and oh, how I know the comments people make. Despite working two jobs and volunteering, earning competitive scholarships, and working now in service to the health of my fellow Americans, any mention of my debt paints me as an incompetent burden on society. My six-figure debt and I are a barnacle on America’s ship disfiguring the facade and resisting progress.
But here’s the thing. Every borrower I know is so much more than debt. We give our time and money back to our communities, we work in life-saving, innovative, future-building, commerce-generating, problem-solving professions that keep our country thriving. And the majority of us are relentlessly working to solve our own damn student loan debt problem however we can.
So what do I say to a fearful America uncomfortable with our $1.4 trillion in student loan debt?
“You can believe what you want about my generation. You can call us lazy, entitled, slacktivists, whatever derogatory terms you want.
But my generation isn’t stopping.
We will find a way out of this. We will build our way out, we will upset the order of higher education and replace it with a system that enables achievement of dreams through education.
We will do this with your help, but if you fail to help us we will find a way to do it without you.
Our generation isn’t the enemy of yours, we refuse to pit ourselves against you. Together we will build the future America and we have boundless potential to build it into a country that powers dreams for us all.”
References
1. NCES table 330.10 Tuition and Fees + Room and Board at four year public institutions 1979-1980 & 2015-2016 https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_330.10.asp?current=yes
2. Minimum wage information US Department of Labor https://www.dol.gov/whd/minwage/chart.htm
3. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI Inflation Calculator https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm
3. NCES table 330.10 Tuition & Fees + Room and Board at four year public institutions 2012-2013 https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_330.10.asp
4. https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013165.pdf U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2011–12 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS:12).
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