No matter what happens, they can’t take my education away from me
Illustration by MUTI
Every so often I have a moment of clarity in which I remember that I will be in debt for the rest of my life. It eventually passes. It always does. Sometimes it’s in the middle of the night, sometimes it’s when I’m taking an extra long shower, sometimes it’s when I stumble upon yet another depressing article about how we’re all saddled with a terrible amount of student loan debt.
We are the hollow ones. The indebted ones.
I particularly hate articles where writers bemoan the fact they went to college or suggest that if you can’t afford it then you shouldn’t go to college at all. Hell no. The idea that anyone should be punished for trying to learn something makes me unbelievably sad and incredibly enraged. Hell, the idea that anyone has to go thousands and thousands of dollars into debt to get a piece of paper that proves that they learned something — it makes my blood boil. But what else could we have done? It was a damned if you damned if you don’t situation.
Maybe college isn’t for everyone, but I think that anyone who wants to, should be able to try. Yet, so many students end up regretting having gone to college — maybe they didn’t graduate, maybe a state school would have been cheaper, maybe their degree isn’t what they really wanted, or maybe it was what they love but doesn’t pay the bills — whatever it may be all of those outcomes still leave them stuck with the bill.
I’ve seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by the crushing weight of student loans.
I’ll always remember that my father told me that no matter what happens, they can’t take my education away from me. It’s true. They can’t repossess what I’ve learned. So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.
I’m one of the lucky ones in that I have all Federal loans — loans that can be consolidated and deferred, and repaid based on my income. David, who went to a private liberal arts college in Southern Illinois had to get private loans to cover his education — like so many middle class families who made too much for financial aid, but not enough to pay for anything outright. We shell out several hundred dollars a month to three separate private loan companies, who refused to consolidate any more than that, who sell the loans to a new provider every couple of months, who change the due dates randomly, who call often to harass us or his parents. I hate them.
I’ll never forget how weird it was to get letters from David’s student loan companies while living in Seoul. Those bastards will literally track you down to the ends of the earth.
And would it have been worth it, after all?
I never actually made much of a dent in my student loans from undergrad, anyway. And now I’m basically tripling what I’ll owe. And then some. But for me it’s worth it. It’s worth it because I’m learning something valuable to me. I know I’ll be able to get a better jobs and continue making the minimum payments until I die. I honestly expect that I’ll have to work until I die, so I may as well enjoy what I’m doing, right?
It’s best not to think about how we could have bought a house for what we owe in loans. Or a really sweet car. It doesn’t really do any good to dwell on it too often or too intently. It is what it is. And while I’d love to dream of loan forgiveness, refinancing that actually helps, or a future where American students don’t have to go up to their eyeballs in debt to learn something — I’m not terribly optimistic. I’d hate for my future children to go through what we went though. I’m hoping by then we’ll have figure our shit out in the U.S. Otherwise, they’ll be going to school in Germany.
No matter what happens, I know these two things to be true: 1) No one can take away my education, and 2) I can’t take anything with me when I die, including student loan debt.