Barack Obama is having a town hall meeting today, which I hope to virtually attend. I heard about it a little too late to have my question be voted on, but it was with relief that I noticed my concern mentioned in the most popular questions section:
President Obama, what are you going to do to rescue your most educated citizens who are buried in student loan debt?
Patrick and I expected to make some sacrifice in order to get our educations. We both knew, going in, that an advanced humanities degree was not going to net us $150k starting salary or corporate sponsored lavish benefits. We knew that we would not have a flashy lifestyle. We would never own a summer home, never buy expensive shoes, never stay at the Ritz. Vacations, Christmas gifts, retirement, our children’s college – these are things that we would have to save for. We were prepared to take this less materially wealthy life, in exchange for the less tangible things that we value more: well-developed minds; subsidized travel and research; workplace flexibility; more time with family; opportunities to share and create and promote ideas. We would have smaller houses, fewer children, older clothes, tighter budgets. I understood this fully, as did he. Or anyway, as fully as an 18 year old can understand it, when she signs on the dotted line of her Stafford Unsubsidized Loan Agreement form in a large auditorium during her freshman orientation.
What has actually happened, however, is so much more extreme than this. We have not just traded shopping at Nordstrom’s for shopping at Target. We have been crippled by our debts, because as education costs rise so dramatically, the wage for a working person has fallen. The straight wage for a starting professor has deflated over the past five years, so that the conditions surrounding the goal that we have been working toward for half a decade have completely changed now that we reach the end. We made careful, measured decisions over the past several years, a cost benefit analysis, a clear eyed assessment of what we were giving up and what we were getting. Now the "getting" part of that equation has shriveled, to the point that our sacrifices for five years have left us with exactly the same choices that we had five years ago.
The economy collapsed, and rendered moot half a decade of work. And half a decade of time, the passage of which I feel more keenly now than I ever did before we had Jack.
Does this sound dramatic? Like hysterics? Does this sound like the whining of a selfish, coddled brat? I don’t care what it sounds like, it’s true. I’m neither selfish, nor coddled, and neither is my husband. We are worried. And a little desperate. And a little bit ready for the pressure to ease off a bit. Like I said, we work very hard and make very big sacrifices, and it is neither selfish nor bratty to long for a return on our investments in ourselves. A moderate return. We don’t want a free ride, we just want a couple of jobs that pay maybe $50k apiece so we can pay our $15,000 a year in student loan debts and live large on the rest. But there are no jobs. Just the debt. This looming, scary repayment that tempts us both to go back to full time school, just to avoid it.
I want the President to consider loan forgiveness for hours of service. I want him to consider interest rate reductions. Income contingent repayment plans. An extended post-graduation grace period, especially now, for those students who are exiting school into a job market that has no room for them. At this point, the higher education system of the United States of America has seriously decentivized graduate and even undergraduate education. The American Dream dictates that the hardworking can have a chance, and with education costs (and let’s not even get into healthcare costs!) spiralling upward without a similar upward trend in wage for those jobs that require graduate degrees, then the poor and even middle class have no chance. We need a percentage of our populace to be highly educated, so they can educate the rest of the populace. We don’t need to spoil them, or overpay them, or give them something for nothing. But we do need them, and right now we’re killing them.
I’m tired of feeling like a charity case. My husband wants to provide for his kid, and he has the experience, the grades, the smarts, and the work ethic to do it. Ten years ago, were we in the same situation, he would have owed approximately 35% less for his degree, had three times as many opportunities coming out of it, and probably at least 10% higher starting pay than now. Ahh, to have been born in 1968.
This is long on whine and short on solution (well, solutions over which we have immediate control,) but I just needed to spew this negative stuff out there. To clear myself out. I have already begun strategizing, and though the husband has a meeting tonight, tomorrow night we are both free. We will put the baby to bed and then whip out some spreadsheets and some paper and pens and put our thinking caps on and forge a way. We still have several options. It isn’t going how we wanted it to go, and sometimes these situations provide the coolest opportunities to reboot, change focus, and have an even better outcome than you ever dreamed of.
In other words, folks, Patrick is abandoning his dream of being a professor to follow his real ambition: to be a Major League Baseball pitcher. I myself am leaving Human Resources to become a famous actress – I hear that this really cool company is coming to the Marriott Hotel searching for Hot! New! Faces! and I think my face is pretty hot. We’re going to put Jack on an intensive gymnastics training course (just as soon as he can stand without assistance) so that he can become a gold-medalist Olympian at the age of 12, and then we can farm him out for the phatty cash endorsements, which we intend to squander on a lavish lifestyle so that he can later wrangle more money out of the system by disowning us and selling his story to People magazine. Also, our cat can sing opera, and it’s time to present her to the world and reap the benefits that a famous opera-singing cat can bring. Wouldn’t you pay to see a cat sing opera? I would pay to see a cat sing opera.
i\’m not sure if you would qualify or not, but there is a program for direct loans (ie. federal loans) called \’income contingent repayment.\’ if you are in the FFEL program, they have what they call \’income sensitive repayment.\’ in these programs, they will look at your income and determine your monthly payment based off of that. it\’s worth a shot…being in financial aid, i see each and every day how much havoc student loans create.
Thank you, super jane! We will look into that . . . but my feeling is that if we keep putting off paying the piper, then they\’ll be on our backs forever. We pay more now than we have to, just a little bit. As long as it remotely conceivable that we can keep up our pmts, we will, just to chip away. I REALLY want our loans gone and have at least a year of breathing room before we begin taking out loans to send Jack to college!
I have no solutions, either… but I had to let you know this post had me lizzing.