Member-only story
We Owe $356,000 in Student Loans. That’s Only Part of the Problem.
The growing financial, mental, and social costs of higher education
Yes, you read that right — my partner and I owe over $356,000 in student loans. Did you just wince? I did.
At age 41, I’m still paying off the $24,000 in loans I graduated with 20 years ago. The rest has been accumulated during my partner’s 11-year postsecondary educational journey. Since we’re married, his debt is my debt.
Every time I think about it, my heart starts to palpitate. Mostly, I try not to.
A financial advisor once told us that as long as the loans have a reasonable fixed interest rate and a monthly payment we can afford, we just need to put debt “over there” in our heads. “Over there,” I’ve found, is a good place for it to live.
But there are times when it has loomed over us, impossible to ignore — like that time when we found out that a few small private loans we’d taken out for my partner’s undergraduate education had somehow ballooned into over $90,000.
It’s astonishingly easy, we learned, to fall into serious student loan debt. But it’s not just that it’s harder to pay for college — the cost of which has increased by 169% over the last 40 years — it’s also that nearly…
