A Public Issue. My Debts, Part One.
Student Debt is not just a personal trouble. It's a social issue. I've decided to tell the story of my ongoing, twenty-five-year-long journey through the American student loan system.
I recently listened to a fantastic discussion between two of America’s leading scholars studying the inequities built into higher education: Tressie McMillan Cottom and Louise Seamster. Among the key insights of their scholarship: student debt creates social and economic problems for everyone in the United States. If you think the $1,700,000,000 in overall student loan debt somehow doesn’t affect you, even if you’ve never taken out a student loan… well, I’m sorry to tell you that the entire U.S. economy and virtually every social institution feels the weight of every one of those nearly two trillion dollars. Don’t believe me? Go listen to McMillan Cottom and Seamster’s enlightening (and enjoyable, despite the topic) conversation here, and then come on back to the newsletter.
After listening to McMillan Cottom and Seamster, I’ve decided to tell my personal story about student loan debt. Student debt is, like so much of our lives, socially determined. The great American sociologist C. Wright Mills first defined the links between “social issues” and “personal troubles.” With the sociological imagination, it becomes possible to appreciate the ways that our individual troubles (like the need to make monthly loan payments) are connected to larger social issues (such as the government’s failure to provide adequate support to educational institutions). As part of giving thanks to everyone in my life who has contributed (formally and informally) to my education, this series about my student debt will show how educational institutions and structures have influenced my family and me over the past twenty-five years.
One thing to know before hearing about my personal journey with student debt is this: I’m one of the lucky ones. My story, in many ways, can be looked at as a “good outcome,” or even a “best case scenario.” For me, personally, student debt provided me with a pathway to a fulfilling career. For many of my peers, student debt did not provide that pathway. My goal in writing this series, however, is not to describe this inequity in detail. Rather, my intention is to illustrate how even when it provides a “good outcome,” student debt causes tremendous social and individual strain. Let me know if you agree with that conclusion.
And yes, as I hope my story will help to show: it has long been time to end the student debt crisis through forgiveness. President Biden should cancel student debt, immediately, as Senator Elizabeth Warren and many others have been saying for quite some time now.
In this first part of what will be a multi-part series on the newsletter, I’ll outline the ways that education—and debt—are both social, not merely invididual, concerns. Then, I’ll set up the start of my student debt journey, which began in the late 1990s. In the next installment, I’ll get into some of the nitty-gritty of how I’ve managed my debt over the past twenty-four years. Spoiler alert: I’m still managing my debt, right now. It’s possible that 2022 will mark the end of my student debt, twenty-five years after I took out my first loans. Maybe the final installment of this series on the newsletter will describe the moment that I can declare the end of my individual journey. It will not change the fact, though, that student debt is a social issue, not just a personal trouble.
Education is Social
Many people still think of education as a consumer item—something that you buy to make your life better in some way. Like, a new phone. I pay Apple $600 (or, I mean, $1200 if you want the really big one) and now I get to enjoy a nicer camera and brighter screen. The only person who gets to use that new phone, though, is me, right? I look at that shiny new screen for three hours a day (who are we kidding, more like twelve hours a day), and I’m the only individual who truly gets all the benefits of my new phone.
“Buying” an education isn’t like buying a smartphone, though. If you spend your money on tuition, fees, and supplies for your education, at the end of the day, you are not the only individual who enjoys your new education. When you’re better educated, you improve your community in tangible and intangible ways. Better educated people tend to be better neighbors. They are more likely to solve problems and create more opportunities for the people around them. And, yes, better educated people have (on average) higher incomes—incomes that the better educated can spend to improve the economy as a whole (although yes, this provides benefits exclusively for the individuals with the higher incomes, of course).
These are some of the reasons why education is best understood not as a consumer item, but rather as a social good. Providing good education for all the people in a community benefits everyone in that community. Upgrading education isn’t like upgrading your phone, it’s more like upgrading the transportation systems that allow everyone to get to work safely and reliably.
Unfortunately, because education is still seen (by most Americans) as more like a phone that you buy, it seems OK to ask the individuals who go to college to use a “credit card” when they “buy” their education. If you want a diploma, you can pay for it yourself!
Debt is Social
This was the idea, five decades ago, when the student debt system was created. If you choose to go to college, and you lack the money for the (relatively low, back then) tuition, you can easily get a student loan. This way, only the individuals who “buy” education pay for it, see! Why ask the whole community to pay for your new phone/education, when you can just pay for it yourself with a simple little student loan?
That student debt, however, does not only affect the person who takes it on. The loans affect everyone around that person. Taken as a whole, all of that debt causes shifts in our entire society. When tens of millions of Americans have student debt, that means Americans in general are more likely to delay having kids, to delay saving for retirement, to delay starting a small business, to delay buying a home or a car—or a phone. All of these delays add up. They’re a drag on the economy, and a problem for families, religious institutions, businesses, and more.
All of the student debt adds up, and what they add up to is this: we are less well off as a society than we should be. We are all getting dragged down by student loans—even those Americans who never went into debt.
Go listen to that conversation between McMillan Cottom and Seamster for a fuller explanation of these dynamics; it’s the best thing you can do to learn more about these issues right now. In particular, they’ll show you how the student debt crisis systematically disadvantages people from working class families, and especially Black families and immigrant communities.
My “Best Case Scenario” Student Debt Story
In this series on the newsletter here, I’m going to tell the story of my student loans. Let me preface this by saying, once again, as clearly as I can: I'm one of the lucky ones.
First of all, I have been in an enviable position with my supportive family. They have always been there to help when I ran into financial trouble. My family is not tremendously wealthy, but looking back, my grandparents and parents have had access to some wealth. They have always been able to cut me a check if I needed that. They gifted me things like computers and cars as I was going through college and graduate school, enabling me to access opportunities that would otherwise have been almost impossible for me to reach.
For example, one time when I had just arrived at grad school, when the school’s administration ran a full six weeks late in getting my paycheck to me for being a teaching assistant (thanks again for that, UC Santa Barbara!), my mom and dad were able to cover my rent for me that month. So I didn’t end up getting in trouble there, and I was able to focus on my studies instead of becoming overwhelmed with financial distress.
And, yeah, about twenty years before that, my parents got themselves a nice house in the suburbs so that my sisters and I could go to good public schools in Southfield, Michigan. And here I'm just scratching the surface of the benefits that came to me thanks to the accident of my birth. I can't say it enough: thank you to my parents and everyone in the Love family!
Secondly, I've had the good fortune to have been employed any time I wanted to be. In college, I worked as a Resident Assistant (RA, now called something fancier like "community advisor," I think), and in the summers I was a lifeguard and manager at public swimming pools, while living at home with my parents. I was a TA (and in a union), and I held down other fairly flexible jobs for most of my time in grad school. All this enabled me to have some spending cash and to pay for school supplies.
Graduating Well
What’s more: over the years during and after my formal schooling, I took some risks that--thanks mainly to good fortune--paid off (big time). I'm going to say that I felt confident enough to take these chances mainly because I "graduated well" from college (listen to McMillan Cottom and Seamster on the concept of "graduating well" to know what that means).
Look, it's impossible to find just one thing that enabled me to get out of my twenties and then land on both of my feet, of course. But if I had to point to just one: it would be my relationship with my mentor: the late, great Professor of Sociology, Leonard Berkey. By meeting Len, and having the time and space to develop a relationship with him, I learned how to go about the conversion that I went through, the one that turned this nerdy kid into a "professional." He nurtured my interests, and showed me the way forward. That is something that was made possible by a lot of things, not least of which were the time and space created by the private small liberal arts college where we met, time and space created by the ample educational resources amassed and deployed by that institution.
Then, after spending four years in college and another eight years in graduate school, I rolled the dice and managed to emerge with a career in sociology. Today, I’m writing this as a tenured professor at a great liberal arts college.
And, nearly 25 years after starting college, and a full decade after completing my Ph.D., I still have student loans that I am paying off.
To Be Continued in Part Two
Next time on the newsletter, I’ll tell you a bit about my journey with the American student loan system, starting with the late 1990s, when Boyz II Men and student loans still had a lot of cultural cache in America.