Welcome to Earlobe Calming, a collection of desperate, vulnerable, and collaborative acts.
$91,656.39. That’s my total student debt burden, a number that lives rent free in my mind every waking and sleeping moment. $91,656.39.
Sometimes I ask myself how I racked up this much debt – if there’s a wrong decision I made or a different path I could have taken. For instance, what if I had attended a public university like the University of Minnesota for undergrad instead of a private university like St. Olaf College whose tuition is $50,000/year, but the collection of grants and work study I recieved brought the “EFC” or Expected Family Contribution to tuition to $13,000 my first year, the same price I would have paid at a public university. Maybe things would be better if I would have gone to graduate school in the US instead of in Ireland – or if I would have gone part time and worked a job while going to grad school? But Irish tutition, even for foreigners, is cheapter than the same programs in the United States and I even recieved a small scholarship from the College. Even if I would have been able to find a job in Ireland during a pandemic to work part time, I know how difficult it is to perform well academically while working another job – having worked two jobs my Junior year at St. Olaf and three my senior year of undergrad. And anyway the extra year of Dublin rent would have made the whole grad school operation way more expensive.
So really, the only mistake I made was growing up with the expectation of attending college but without the familial wealth to afford it. I’ve been reminded of this while waiting for the stipend for several months that, even if you find funding to pay for your education you’re still expected to support yourself in the case that funding tets tied up in administrative bureacracy or if its just not quite enough to support you. To grow up in a family where the Expected Family Contribution was never going to fit the budget and instead would be translated directly into a loan taken out by myself or my parents. I’m not a first generation college student, no even my grandparents went to college, my grandma went to nursing school after raising 8 kids. I’m not a woman nor am I Black, both demographics have higher debt burdens than other races or genders according to the National Center for Education Statistics, and yet I have between 2 and three times the debt burden of any of the averages listed on their website. This is including graduate school and undergraduate loans. My mistake was thinking I had permission to partake in an education system that was created for and continues to benefit the wealthy. To show you what I mean I want to break this big number, $91,656.39, into three short stories.
Private Loana, serviced by Sallie Mae: $10,890.51
It was just last month when my mom told me the real reason why we took out a private loan for my first year of college. The story I knew was that during the recession my dad had lost the business he had started. When the business went under my parents credit went belly up and so they weren’t able to take out a state loan to pay the Expected Family Contribution and so I had to go to our friend SallieMae and take out my own loan.
The detail I was missing was the phone bill. When my dad lost the business there was a $200 phone bill he hadn’t paid because the business was gone and he didn’t need the service anymore but you know phone companies, you have to call to cancel at least 30 days before you lose everything or else you get charged. It was this unpaid bill for an unused service that pinged the Federal Department of Education’s credit check. The real twist of the kinfe wasn’t that this $200 bill was the reason I ended up owing money to predatory private loan sharks when I was barely a legal adult, no the real irony is that a few weeks later, after the SallieMae documents had been signed and my parents had gone to my uncle to ask him to cosign for me, they got a call from the Department of Ed telling them that, after a closer look at the situation, their credit had been approved after all.
Minnesote State SELF loan, which stands for Student Education Loan Fund, serviced by Firstmark Services: $10,465.07
When I returned to school for the Masters program last year, I went through the familiar ritual of obtaining in-school deferment for my loans. Now, this isn’t exactly how it sounds. In most cases payments aren’t nixed altogether while you’re in school, often deferment means paying only the interest instead of contributing to the principal. And yes, this does often mean that part of your current student loan goes towards payments on your previous student loans. So I contact the person in the Academic Registry, get them to sign the three different forms for my three loan servicers, and I submit them all into their respective document upload portals. And then about a week later I get a notification from Firstmark Services that my in school deferment has been denied. Apparently once a SELF loan borrower is out of school for more than 3 years, they are no longer eligible for deferment. This means that, instead of quarterly $40 interest payments, I’ve had to make monthly payments of $168.52, which amounts to judt around a tenth of my annual stipend for the PhD. The fact that there’s a time limit for being out of school is absurd and frustrating. Myself and other student debt holders tend to delay going back to school precisely because they’re saddled with so much debt out of undergrad. But the worst thing is that I had been out of school for three years and three months – the extra time keeping me from deferment was effectively the summer between the end of term in the spring, and the start of term in the fall – a summer in which I had already accepted the offer for the masters program but acceptance, according to Firstmark Services and the State of Minnesota, does not equal enrollment.
Federal loans, serviced – at least for the moment – by Navient: 11 separate loans totaling $70,300.81
This is the big one. Not just the amount but this is the most important. I have little hope that SallieMae will ever cancel my loans and I don’t have much faith in the State of Minnesota either but President Biden could cancel all federal loans with a simle executive order and folks like the Student Debt Crisis Center, the Debt Collective, and 44 million people who collectively struggle under more than 1.8 trillion dollars in student debt are asking him to do just that, to cancel at least $50,000 for each debtor. Now you may have picked up that $50,000 wouldn’t completely eliminate my student debt. I would still owe over $20,000 in federal debt alone, but it would at least give me some space to breathe. It would let me attempt to envision a future that is not teetering on the brink.
Historian Elizabeth Tandy Shermer gave a talk for the Trinity Long Room Hub at my unviersity yesterday on the history of student loans in the United States, the subject of her recently published book Indentured Students. Shermer discussed that the original federal student loans were based off the financial product of a morgage. But student loans, as she clarifies, are not a morgage. The bank can’t reposess your degree if you’re unable to pay and even if they could strip away your diploma or your post-nominals, they can’t take the knowledge out of your head. If they did, it would rob you of your ability to make more money to pay off your debt. On the other hand, the education we go into debt to pursue touches every part of our life and loan servicers in their graduated and income-based repayment schemes garnish not only our wages and retirement, but the careers and futures we could have had if we weren’t stuck paying for the ideas in our head. The debt collectors take from the rounds of drinks bought, the relationships built, and the dinner table lovingly set. In her talk, Dr. Shermer clarified that student debtors like her and like me are asking president Biden for loan cancellation, not for forgiveness, because we did not do anything wrong in pursuing an education. Dr. Shermer’s work shows that the federal government instead of actually funding education for all americans by giving actual dollars to educational institutions to make college free, has continued turning to student loan programs that keep education a priviledge of the wealthy while intenturing the poor to the banks. Obtaining and benefiting from a degree, whether its an associates or a masters, should be everyone’s right so why doesn’t the US government treat it that way?
I really wish I could say that $91,656.39 is the full sum of my educational debt but in reality this is only the debt in my name. My parents have taken out PLUS loans, which stands for Parent Loan for Undergraduate Students, for both my brother and I during our entire undergraduate career. There’s an uncomfortable possibility that I might reinherit that debt some day – but even today, with my parents doing better financially than they’ve ever been, we carry the emotional baggage of educational debt with us in every interaction. My mom has always been there to affirm for me that education is the best investment that you can make. She told me this when we took out our first student loan and she affirmed it when I was nervousely running the numbers for graduate school. I believe her of course, but things haven’t been adding up exactly. If this is an investment, when do I see the dividends? Why is it that even when I was making $50,000 working at a nonprofit, my income based repayment plan still kept me just a few steps from the edge? If I’ve invested so much why can’t I picture a future without this number looming over me like a bounty? Why is it that this hole I’ve been asked to dig feels more and more like a grave.
Be First to Comment