A few years ago, I wrote a piece on my financial aid adventures and how college financial aid is a fucking joke. However! It's my birthday tomorrow, I am now 31 days from receiving my BFA in creative writing, and the future is bleak, babes.
I got through college much more easily, financially speaking, than most of my peers. I spent two years at a state university, which limited my debts significantly; and I received thousands upon thousands of dollars from Combined Jewish Philanthropies in Boston, which was an absolute godsend. The representative I worked with at CJP advocated for me and is pretty much singlehandedly responsible for my ability to be at Wheaton. (Lee Ann, if you read this, thank you.) Without looking at my records, I would very roughly estimate that CJP gave me over $20k in grant money over the course of my college career, an amount that has been literally life-changing for me. I also worked the entire time I was in school, which helped me to manage the remaining costs. My only debts are federal - essentially the bare minimum debt I could possibly expect.
And yet, those debts currently total $31,932.81 - a sum that immediately stresses me out.
Now, because I have been both very lucky and very hardworking, I do have something of a nest egg at the moment, approximately $17k. But that money is going to disappear fast. I have to buy a car, pay for car insurance (which will be pretty high due to the two accidents I was in a few years ago), find a place to live, pay bills. I finally have the means to get an emotional support dog, and I've started the process - an exciting milestone, but one that will cost another several thousand dollars. So after all this, I'm more or less back to square one.
That's okay though, right? I'm about to graduate, after all; I'll get myself a job and have the money to deal with everything.
I live in Massachusetts, which has the fourth highest minimum wage in the country - $14.25 an hour, behind only Washington state ($14.49), California ($15), and the District of Columbia ($15.20). So I should be okay, right?
Let's math this out. If I make minimum wage and work full-time, that's a sexy, sexy... $28,500. Before taxes.
A living wage in Massachusetts - that is to say, a wage that enables you to pay for your food, housing, utilities, and other basic needs without going broke - is a little over $70k a year.
"Okay," you may be saying, "but doesn't your BFA grant you some sort of wage increase?"
Sure! My most likely actual salary once I have a settled job is somewhere in the range of $35-45k. You do the math.
Let's tally this up: I just spent $32k of the government's money, $22k of CJP's money, and somewhere between $10k and $15k of my own money, plus something like $8k of Framingham State's money and a truly upsetting $129,840 of Wheaton's money. (Yes, over the course of two years, Wheaton College gave me a hundred and twenty-nine thousand, eight hundred and forty dollars in financial aid.)
The total? Over $200k for a four-year degree.
When you look at that number, suddenly the $32k I have to pay back looks less upsetting - after all, imagine the size and duration of payments for the full amount. But let's be clear:
All of this is an artificially constructed system.
There is absolutely no reason that college should cost this much. A solid 66% of developed countries charge under $2k a year all told. I could've paid for all of that out of my savings right now and still had leftovers.
The gap between what a four-year degree costs and what that degree does for your earning potential is unreasonable. Long-term, it's frequently not even worth it. And the kicker is that a lot of tradespeople make an easy six figures without crushing debt. (And they deserve every penny! I'd better not see any comments disparaging blue-collar workers, who are the entire reason your house isn't falling down around your ears right now.)
And every four years, I see the same thing: presidential candidates, in an attempt to appeal to the infamously disaffected voters of my generation, promise us free college, reduced-price college, student loan debt forgiveness, or some other fix... and then they don't follow through. President Joe Biden, by whom I was already disappointed before he even won the primary, promised "up to $30k in student loan debt forgiveness" for every eligible borrower. Then, after he was elected, it suddenly slipped down to maybe ten. Then he dropped the new guidelines for who's eligible, and it's almost exactly the same people who were eligible before. And in case you were wondering, students who borrowed due to "low income" are excluded from that list.
Let me reiterate: students who borrow from the government because they cannot afford to go to college are explicitly excluded from student loan debt forgiveness. You know who isn't excluded? Cops. Do y'all know what cops make in a year? It is not nothing.
Now, I never believed that Uncle Joe (or Grandpa Joe, or whatever adorable misnomer he's been given) was going to actually forgive so much as a cent of my debt. But he still made that promise, just like so many candidates before him, and didn't follow through. So instead of the American Dream™ of educated young adults building fabulous careers and buying houses and starting families, we've got a whole generation crushed by debt, and another generation that's about to go the same way.
A lot of my articles end with a call to action, but I don't have one for this. This sucks, and it's pretty much entirely out of our hands. The only thing I can think to do is keep using my voice and my vote to try, one tiny, tiny piece at a time, to push our fucked-up late capitalist society to do better.
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