My financial situation is vastly worse than that of my parents, who were 40 when I was born.
They always owned houses and had new cars, never worried about seeing a doctor, benefited from solid pensions and preached that college was the secret to their success. (Their tuition in 1960s Arkansas was about $250 a semester.) There were opportunities for them that they were able to take advantage of. There was a ladder. I'm not sure that ladder exists any more.
I put myself through college, graduating with a reasonable $40,000 in debt and an education degree right into the beginning of the recession. The debt has ballooned, after I’ve gotten halfway through a master’s degree, to about $70,000, despite my paying it back for almost 15 years.
It’s hard with student loans because there’s so much animus and kind of shame wrapped up in it. So much of culture tells you, “This was your decision, you took out the money, you should have known that you were going to pay it back.” These are predatory loans. I went to a state school and took out a reasonable amount of loans and then graduated into a recession where I just couldn’t pay them.
There was no recognition at all in 2008 of people like me who came out of school and immediately had to go into forbearance and deferment and were just racking up interest for the duration while we were trying to get jobs. I ended up working in a call center for the next seven or eight years. I could not get a job that had anything to do with my degree at all.
I have always worked, sometimes two, three, four jobs and side gigs at a time, and did so with a can-do attitude because we needed it and it had to be done. But with student loans, it was like throwing money into a black hole.
At this point my payments don’t even cover the interest. It’s so, so far gone. And there’s no getting out of it. It’s like a black cloud over your head.
When my oldest child was little, I scratched our way into a great school system that was fed by a rich neighborhood, and he frequently found himself the kid with a bad haircut in secondhand clothes sitting next to fine-boned doctors’ children with BMWs in the school parking lot.
Now he is college age, and I can’t help him. So then we’re talking about two generations of student loans compounded for a college degree that everyone agrees my son needs to succeed in life.
This is the second big recession for us. It’s not like I can just pull out money from my 401(k). I emptied my 401(k) to pay for what I needed during the last recession.
Every time I’ve gotten a little bit of momentum, everything just grinds to a halt.
My opinion is that because of the infrastructural changes, the policy decisions that were made between 1963, when my parents were in college, and when it was time for me to start making big decisions around 2000, the deck was fully stacked against individuals and loaded for big corporate entities to consolidate money and power at the expense of us.
I don't think it was that way for my parents when they were young.
"Opinion" - Google News
April 17, 2020 at 04:00PM
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Opinion | 'I Am The Portrait of Downward Mobility' - The New York Times
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