When I was preparing to matriculate to college, I had no idea how I was going to pay for it. I was looking into a $50,000 student loan. To a high school student who has only held minimum wage jobs and never had any bills, tens of thousands of dollars is hard to comprehend. Even though I cognitively knew how much it was, I couldn’t feel how much it was. I knew how to calculate hourly rates, but I didn’t understand how many hours of work it was. I knew that it would take around 15 years to pay back, but I couldn’t grasp that number as I had only even been alive 17 years at the time. In spite of these facts, I had no problem finding offers. They frisked me up and down for my $7,000 car loan, but I didn’t even need a co-signer for $50,000. I had no shortage of people offering me the loans…and no shortage of people telling me to take them. That latter part is the real problem.
I was lucky enough to actually be anxious about taking on such a big financial burden. My parents had warned me about student loans and even though we were not poor I watched them struggle just enough to be able to take their financial warnings seriously. It’s a good thing too because just about every other adult that I talked to about tuition had just accepted that taking out a small mortgage was a pre-requisite for going to college. This was particularly true at school. Teachers and counselors who were all well meaning encouraged me to look into student loans. Not just me, but all of my classmates too. That was simply the culture. I ended up not going that route. My parents had saved some money but I ended up working as an R.A. and choosing a route that was relatively cheap. However, I had plenty of classmates who took the advice and are mired in debt to this day.
I don’t resent any of the educators in my life for pointing me in that direction. I don’t feel victimized. Honestly, at the time, it was conventional wisdom. But hindsight is 20/20 and when you know better you do better. We are in a student loan crisis. We have to make different decisions.
I am over a decade removed from college. I am a teacher with my own former students going to college. One such student whom I still see on occasion hit me up for help navigating the college process. She asked about options for paying, and I mentioned student loans with the relevant warning. The next time I saw her she brought her laptop and asked for help completing an application for a federal student loan. She asked quite a few questions. At one point, she asked for help understanding the interest rate. At that moment two thoughts popped into my head:
- Why wasn’t she listening when I taught her how to calculate interest rates in class?
- If she needed this much help filling out the application, then perhaps she wasn’t ready to make this decision.
Yeah, I know that needing help with an application doesn’t negate the necessity of said application. However, it does highlight where students are mentally when they sign away their life. I didn’t talk her into taking the loan, and I didn’t talk her out of it. I did, however, give her a stern mentor session where I explained what she was doing.
I told her that she was about to take out more money than I have saved for retirement. I told her that two-thirds of the teachers she had while at my school hadn’t yet paid off their own loans. I told her that even if she didn’t have the money to pay-back, they were still going to take it from her because student loans are nondischargeable.
She ended up taking out a loan but for a much smaller amount than she had initially planned. Good thing too. She was only at that school for a semester, then it was back home at the local junior college on scholarship.
President Joe Biden made a campaign promise to forgive student loans. His effort to make good on that promise has created a legal battle at the federal level, a battle that probably will end at the U.S. Supreme Court. Forgiving ten to twenty thousand dollars in student loans is a huge deal and shouldn’t be overlooked. What also shouldn’t be overlooked are people who are still taking out student loans. Which is fine so long as it is completely of their own doing, but most times, that is not the case.
Students are often encouraged into taking out student loans, and there is way too little friction in process of taking out tens of thousands of dollars in nondischargeable debt. If an educator is not going to be there to “help” pay the loans off, then they shouldn’t “help” them arrive at the decision to take them out. Don’t hide the loan information from them but remember that you work for the school not Sallie Mae.