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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 everything else is harder, too. It’s harder to apply for schools, harder to gain admission, and harder to enter fields that didn’t previously require advanced degrees.
Beyond the financial cost, which is staggering in and of itself, the price tag of higher education also comes with very real mental, emotional, and social costs. And if you’re a person of color, like my partner — and particularly if you’re a first-generation wealth builder, like my partner — the costs are even more onerous.
You won’t see any mention of these in the fine print.
The financial cost
When my partner and I started dating, he had just graduated from EMT school. He proceeded to enroll in paramedic school, then took advantage of a bridge program at George Washington University to get his Bachelor’s degree.
He was in the middle of finals when our daughter was born — two weeks early. I…
