Dear Sugar,
My question is not about love or sex, but rather one of identity and striving for the best quality of life possible. I, as many other Americans, am struggling financially. Student loans are continuously on my mind and are the cause of almost every stress in my life.
My parents graciously cosigned for my student loans, however, I am being forced to consolidate in order to relieve them of this duty. I realize this is more out of necessity than spite, yet the situation greatly impacts my already poor financial situation and also my dream of attending graduate school. I’m so angry with my parents for putting me in this circumstance instead of supporting me to get a graduate degree for my dream job, and I feel selfish about that.
My relationship with my parents has always been rocky to the point that I’ve come to realize I’ll never get any emotional support from them. I am grateful they were able to help me with an undergraduate degree. However, I have never been close to them, and am often weary of their intentions. Our phone conversations are 100% concerning student loans rather than me as a person.
I struggle with student loans often defining me. I know my education, student loans, and occupation will define to me an extent. However, I am more than my job and these items combined. I am a twenty-five-year-old woman who strives for the greatest possible quality of life and to be the best person she can be. But more often than not, I am defined by my “student loan” identity. It is on my mind when I grab a beer, buy new clothes, and in general, live my life. I do not spend excessively and have always had careful money management. Yet this situation extends beyond any careful money management.
I have always reached to have a positive spin on life. I fell into a deep, dark hole a few years ago, and have crawled out slowly myself. I purposely changed what I didn’t like about my life. It wasn’t an easy process by any means, but I am finally in a place where I can breath. Yet the stresses of student loans bear greatly, and I am having trouble keeping up any positive outlook.
Sugar, your perspective on life is always refreshing. I would love your perspective on this situation. I wish my parents would see me for the vibrant woman I am. I wish I could see myself as the vibrant young woman I strive to be and would like to be in the future.
Sincerely,
Wearing Thin
Dear Wearing Thin,
I received zero funding from my parents for my undergraduate education (or from relatives of any sort, for that matter). It wasn’t that my mother and stepfather didn’t want to help me financially; it was that they couldn’t. There was never any question about whether I’d need to fend for myself financially once I was able to. I had to. So I did.
I got a job when I was fourteen and the money I earned went to things like clothes, school activity fees, a junked out car, gas, car insurance, movie tickets, mascara, and so on. My parents were incredibly generous people. Everything they had they shared with my siblings and me. They housed me, they fed me, and they went to great lengths to create wonderful Christmases, but, from a very young age, if I wanted something I usually had to buy it myself. My parents were strapped. Most winters there would be a couple of months so lean that my mother would have to go to the local food bank for groceries. In the years that the program was in place, my family received blocks of cheese and bags of powdered milk from the federal government. My health insurance all through my childhood was Medicaid—coverage for kids living in poverty.
I moved out of my parent’s house a month before my eighteenth birthday. With a combination of personal earnings, grants, scholarships, and student loans I funded the bachelor’s degree in English and women’s studies that I’m still paying for. As of today, I owe $4876. Over the years I’ve taken to saying—sometimes with astonishment, other times with anger, but mostly with a sense of resigned, distorted glee: “I’ll be paying off my student loans until I’m forty-three!”
But you know what? I’m waving to you from the shores of forty-three and the months are peeling away. It’s looking extremely likely that I’ll still be paying off my student loans when I’m forty-four.
Has this ruined my life? Has it kept me from pursuing happiness, my writing career, and ridiculously expensive cowboy boots? Has it compelled me to turn away from fantastically financially unsound expenditures on fancy dinners, travel, “organic” shampoo, and high-end preschools? Has it stopped me from adopting cats who immediately need thousands of dollars in veterinary care or funding dozens of friends’ artistic projects on Kickstarter or putting $20 bottles of wine on my credit card or getting bi-annual pedicures?
It has not.
I have carried the weight of my student loan debt for about half of my life now, but I have not been “defined by my ‘student loan’ identity.” I do not even know what a student loan identity is. Do you? What is a student loan identity?
It is, I guess, exactly what you’re stuck with if you can’t get some perspective on this matter, sweet pea. It’s the threadbare cape you’ve wrapped around yourself composed of self-pitying half-truth. And it absolutely will not serve you.
You need to stop feeling sorry for yourself. I don’t say this as a condemnation—I need regular reminders to stop feeling sorry for myself too. I’m going to address you bluntly, but it’s a directness that rises from my compassion for you, not my judgment of you. You must separate the global injustice (why should some be shackled by student loan debt when others aren’t?) from the individual reality (I’ll be paying this damn bill forever).
As you and other long-time readers of this column may know, I’m a socialist at heart, but when it comes to the actual, individual way we live our lives, I adhere to an entirely pull-oneself-up-by-one’s-bootstraps creed. Nobody’s going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you’re rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice. And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things have befallen you. Self-pity is a dead end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It’s up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.
You have driven out at least once already, Wearing Thin. You found yourself in a “deep, dark hole” a while back and then you courageously crawled out. You have to do it again. Your student loans will only hold you back if you allow them to. Yep, you have to figure out how to pay them. Yep, you can do that. Yep, it’s a pain in the ass. But it’s a pain in the ass that I promise will give you back more than you owe.
You know the best thing about paying your own bills? No one can tell you what to do with your money. You say your parents are emotionally unsupportive. You say you’re weary of their intentions. You say they don’t see you for the vibrant woman that you are. Well, the moment you sign that paper absolving them of their financial obligation to your debts, you are free. You may love them, you may despise them, you may choose to have whatever sort of relationship you choose to have with them, but you are no longer beholden to them in this one particular and important way. You are financially accountable only to yourself. If they express disdain for the jobs you have or the way you spend your money, you can rightly tell them it’s none of their damn business. They have absolutely no power over you in this regard. No one does. That’s a mighty liberating thing.
And it’s a hard thing too. I know, honey bun. I really, really, really do.
Many years ago, I ran into an acquaintance I’ll call Kate a few days after we both graduated college (though, in my case, I’m using the word “graduated” rather liberally—see The Future Has an Ancient Heart). Kate was with her parents, who’d not only paid for her entire education, but also for her junior year abroad in Spain, and her summer “educational opportunities” that included unpaid internships at places like GQ magazine and language immersions in France and fascinating archeological digs in God knows what fantastically interesting place. As we stood on the sidewalk chatting, I was informed that: a) Kate’s parents had given her a brand new car for her graduation present and b) Kate and her mother had spent the day shopping for the new wardrobe Kate would need for her first ever job.
Not that she had one, mind you. She was applying for jobs while living off of her parents’ money, of course. She was sending out her glorious resume that included the names of foreign countries and trendy magazines to places that were no doubt equally glorious and I knew without knowing something simply glorious would be the result.
It was all I could do not to sock her in the gut.
Unlike Kate, by then I’d had a job. In fact, I’d had sixteen jobs, not including the years I worked as a babysitter before I could legally be anyone’s employee. They were: janitor’s assistant (humiliatingly, at my high school), fast-food restaurant worker, laborer at a wildlife refuge, administrative assistant to a Realtor, English as a Second language tutor, lemonade cart attendant, small town newspaper reporter, canvasser for a leftie nonprofit, waitress at a Japanese restaurant, volunteer coordinator for a reproductive rights organization, berry picker on a farm, waitress at a vegetarian restaurant, “coffee girl” at an accounting firm, student-faculty conflict mediator, teacher’s assistant for a women’s studies class, and office temp at a half a dozen places that by and large did not resemble offices and did not engage me in work that struck me as remotely “officey,” but rather involved things such as standing on a concrete floor wearing a hairnet, a paper mask and gown, goggles, and plastic gloves and—with a pair of tweezers—placing two pipe-cleaners into a sterile box that came to me down a slow conveyer belt for eight excruciating hours a day.
During those years, I sometimes wept with rage. My dream was to be a writer. I wanted it so badly that it made my insides hurt. And to be a writer—I felt sure—I needed to have a big life. Which at the time meant to me amazing experiences such as the sort Kate had. I needed to experience culture and see the world. I needed to speak French and hang out with people who knew people who worked at GQ.
Instead I was forced, by accident of birth, to work one job after another in a desperate attempt to pay the bills. It was so damn unfair. Why did Kate get to study in Spain her junior year? Why did she get to write the word “France” on her resume? Why did she get her bachelor’s degree debt-free and then, on top of that, a new car? Why did she get two parents who would be her financial fall back for years to come and then—decades into a future, which has not yet come to pass—leave her an inheritance upon their deaths?
I didn’t get an inheritance! My mother died three months before I “graduated” college and all I got was her ancient, rusted-out Toyota that I quickly sold to a guy named Guy for $500.
Bloody hell.
So here’s the long and short of it, Wearing Thin: there is no why. You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding. And dear one, you and I both were granted a mighty generous hand.
Your parents helped you pay for your undergraduate education while you were a student and, presuming you didn’t graduate at twenty-five (a presumption which may or may not be correct), they also paid your monthly loan bill during the years immediately following your graduation. They’ve declined to continue to pay not because they wish to punish you, but because doing so would be difficult for them. This strikes me as perfectly reasonable and fair. You are an educated adult of sound mind, able body and resilient spirit who has absolutely no reason not to be financially self-sufficient, even if doing so requires you to earn money in ways you find unpleasant.
You say you’re grateful to your parents for helping you pay for your undergraduate education, but you don’t sound grateful to me. Almost every word in your letter tells me that you’re pissed off that you’re being required to take over your student loan payments. I point this out because I think it’s important that you acknowledge your anger for what it is. It does not rise out of gratitude. It rises out of the fact that you feel entitled to your parents’ money. You’re simply going to have to come to grips with the fact that you aren’t.
Your parents’ inability to continue paying your student loans will prevent you from realizing your “dream of attending graduate school” only if you let it. Are you really not going to pursue your dream because you now have one more bill than you had before? Are you truly so cowed by adversity?
You don’t mention what you’d like to study, but I assure you there are many ways to fund a graduation education. I know a whole lot of people—myself included—who did not go broke getting a graduate degree. There is funding for tuition remission at many schools, as well as grants, paid research and teaching assistantships, and—yes—the offer of more student loans. Perhaps more importantly in your case, there are numerous ways to either cancel portions of your student loan debt or defer payment. Financial difficulty, unemployment, attending school at least half-time (ie: graduate school!), working in certain professions, and serving in the Peace Corps or other community service jobs are some ways that you would be eligible for debt deferment or cancellation. I encourage you to investigate your options so you can make a plan that brings you peace of mind. There are many web sites that will elucidate what I have summarized above.
What I know for sure is that freaking out about your student loan debt is useless. You’ll be okay. It’s only money. And it was money well spent. Aside from the people I love, there is little I value more than my education. As soon as I pay off my undergraduate debt, Mr. Sugar and I intend to start saving for college for the baby Sugars. My dream is that they’ll have college experiences that resemble Kate’s more than mine. I want them to be able to focus on their studies instead of cramming them in around jobs. I want them to have a junior year abroad wherever they want to go. I want them to have cool internships that they could only take with parental financial support. I want them to go on cultural exchanges and interesting archeological digs. I want to fund all that stuff I never got to do because no one was able to fund me. I can imagine all they would gain from that.
But I can also imagine what they won’t get if Mr. Sugar and I manage to give them the college experience of my dreams.
Turns out, I learned a lot from not being able to go France. Turns out, those days standing on the concrete floor wearing a hairnet, a paper mask and gown, goggles, and plastic gloves and—with a pair of tweezers—placing two pipe-cleaners into a sterile box that came to me down a slow conveyer belt for eight excruciating hours a day taught me something important I couldn’t have learned any other way. That job and the fifteen others I had before I graduated college were my own, personal “educational opportunities.” They changed my life for the better, though it took me a while to understand their worth.
They gave me faith in my own abilities. They offered me a unique view of worlds that were both exotic and familiar to me. They kept things in perspective. They pissed me off. They opened my mind to realities I didn’t know existed. They forced me to be resilient, to sacrifice, to see how little I knew, and also how much. They put me in close contact with people who could’ve funded the college educations of ten thousand kids and also with people who would’ve rightly fallen on the floor laughing had I complained to them about how unfair it was that after I got my degree I’d have this student loan I’d be paying off until I was forty-three.
They made my life big. They contributed to an education that money can’t buy.
Yours,
Sugar
137 responses
Wonderful, Sugar. Just wonderful.
Also, letter writer, Income Based Repayment! Student loans are only a burden if you allow them to be. Info, here: http://ibrinfo.org/
Nice one Sugar, you should give em a smack like this more often
Thank you, Sugar!
Dear Sugar,
You are so wonderfully respectful and gentle. I would refer Wearing Thin to your post “We Are All Savages Inside” (https://therumpus-production.mystagingwebsite.com/2011/03/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-69-we-are-all-savages-inside/)
Particularly the following part:
“A large part of your jealousy probably rises out of your outsized sense of entitlement. Privilege has a way of fucking with our heads the same way a lack of it does. There are a lot of people who’d never dream they could be a writer, let alone land, at the age of 31, a six figure book deal. You are not one of them. And you are not one of them because you’ve been given a tremendous amount of things that you did not earn or deserve, but rather that you received for the sole reason that you happen to be born into a family who had the money and wherewithal to fund your education at two colleges to which you feel compelled to attach the word ‘prestigious.’
“What is a prestigious college? What did attending such a school allow you to believe about yourself? What assumptions do you have about the colleges that you would not describe as prestigious? What sorts of people go to prestigious colleges and not prestigious colleges? Do you believe that you had a right to a free “first-rate†education? What do you make of the people who received educations that you would not characterize as first-rate? These are not rhetorical questions. I really do want you to take out a piece of paper and write those questions down and then answer them. I believe your answers will deeply inform your current struggle with jealousy. I am not asking you these questions in order to condemn or judge you. I would ask a similar series of questions to anyone from any sort of background because I believe our early experiences and beliefs about our place in the world inform who we think we are and what we deserve and by what means it should be given to us.”
You can do it, Wearing Thin! Shoulder your own life!
Nailed it, Sugar. Loved it.
Have you thought about doing a gift guide for this time of year? I have a feeling you have some very creative, meaningful, and heartwarming gift ideas that don’t cost a lot. I saw an article today about the top 5 toys for children (including dirt, a box, string…), and I got to thinking how am I going to pay for Christmas presents for my boyfriend’s family of 6 and my new baby cousins and my most precious sister and on and on…
much love x
“You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding.”
Wow. I want to needlepoint that on 10,000 pillows.
I just graduated from professional school with $200,000 in debt, and last week I bought a pair of $250 totally unnecessary cowboy boots and I LOVE them!! And I refuse to feel bad about finally being able to buy things that I want, even if my monthly payment is over $1700. Because, money is only money. Thanks, Sugar.
I agree with Sugar about learning from shitty experiences, and not giving in to entitlement and jealousy and fear. Live your life, Wearing Thin!
But at the same time…I look at my own student loan debt and sometimes I want to crawl into a hole and never come out. It feels too big.
Dear Sugar and Rumpus Friends,
Please please let this be the next mug in the series so I can remind myself of it many, many times a day:
You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding.
Sugar, I love you.
Without a doubt, the adults I know who are the most emotionally crippled are the ones who, in one way or another but mostly in the financial way, are still tethered to their parents. It’s a terrible disadvantage, actually.
As someone who cannot claim I am totally without consumer lust (I, like you Sugar, have some really expensive boots), I also know that quality of life is relative. Six packs of cheap beer in cold glasses sipped on a couch with a great magazine or two really good friends and hours in which to have branching conversations is just as good as an expensive meal in a nice restaurant. Money can be nice, but it isn’t necessary for a high quality of life.
You’ll do great, Wearing Thin. You’re tougher than you know.
Americorps also offers loan deferment and a chunk of change after serving to pay back loans ($5,500, I think). You don’t have to join the Peace Corps to serve your country… there are tons of opportunities right in out backyards.
Hi there.
I’m not going to tell my own story; it would take too long. But there’s a piece of this student loan resentment problem wrapped up in parental issues that I feel very strongly, and that isn’t in the column. I might be presuming too much to say that Wearing Thin feels it too, but I still wanted to point it out.
Part of the reason I still bear resentment around my student loans is that it was not adequately explained to me exactly how much money $25,000 was. The financial aid office brought me in to sign a promissory note every year, but didn’t tell me what a promissory note actually was, or even that it meant there was going to be debt in my name. No one told me what amortized interest was, or that the interest rate on one student loan meant it should be paid off much more slowly than the other student loan. No one explained what $25,000 broke down to in monthly terms, or what kind of income I’d have to make in order to carry that debt, month to month, for umpteen years.
Our college population, in general, is shockingly underinformed about finances. People with Sugar’s upbringing have the advantage of understanding from the age of 14 how valueless a dollar can really be against bills and objects of desire.
So, Wearing Thin, if you’re feeling that resentment, I’m sorry. The only advice I can offer you is to put it in your knapsack with the rest of the shit you don’t need and then leave that knapsack by the side of the road. It’s heavy, and doesn’t serve you.
Thanks for listening.
So right on, Sugar (no surprise there).
In fact, I think the “gratitude” Wearing Thin does not yet have towards her parents actually comes from beginning to shoulder one’s own burdens. It wasn’t until I had to start repaying my student loans (which, while relatively miniscule thanks to a great deal of parental support during college, nonetheless take all my disposable income away) that I truly understood the enormous financial sacrifices my parents made to send me and my two sisters to college.
It was shouldering their college-financing burdens without ANY parental assistance that made my parents want to do better by me. And every month, when I write three $150 checks to three lending agencies (because I happily took more loans to pay living expenses while in an MFA program), I remember how much more enormous that burden could be, and I call my parents and say thank you, again.
I don’t think they will ever get tired of it.
Americorps also offers loan deferment and a chunk of change after serving to pay back loans ($5,500, I think). You don’t have to join the Peace Corps to serve your country… there are tons of opportunities right in our backyards!
Good luck, Wearing Thin. You are not alone… while France and GQ are culturally brag-worthy options, there are plenty of people like you swimming around us. Me, for example 🙂
Spot on as usual Sugar. I put myself through school way back when college was cheap in California. I worked full time, took classes in the early mornings and evenings, and spent every free moment I had reading and writing papers. New clothes were something I got at Christmas and my birthday from my parents. I now have three kids in college, and want for them all the things I didn’t have. I want them to travel, and have fun and adventures. I do know one thing though. I was so proud that I was independent. That I could do it myself. The main thing I want for my kids is for them to know that they can always take care of themselves. That, as they say, is priceless.
Thank you, thank you, this is what I needed to hear today.
I’m in college working a shitty dish washing job, because I am also paying for my own education because my parents and I agreed that they are unable to financially support me.
I was whining today about how much I don’t want to go do my shift tonight because you could probably be a zombie and still successfully feed dishes into a giant machine, but “it forces me to be resilient, to sacrifice, to see how little I know, and also how much.” Gotta remember that. Thanks again Sugar
This is a really good column. KLM also makes an excellent point. It would do “Wearing Thin” good to kick the self-pity and get involved with movements about the injustice of all forms of debt, poverty, inequality and financial servitude in this country and globe – Occupy Wall Street and many others. I suspect she’d discover two things:
1. A sense of solidarity with other people who are facing overwhelming debt, and the kind of rage against injustice that empowers you and cleanses your soul;
2. The realization that she’s far from the worst off, which will help her get some perspective and stop feeling sorry for herself.
Thanks for this, Sugar. I teach freshman writing at a respected university and every semester I have a mixture of privilege, entitlement, and pulling-up-by-bootstrappers. I find myself in the middle of all of them: privileged, in debt, with plenty of alternative “educational opportunities” that have made me so thankful to be where I am. This column will now be required reading for my students, and I’m looking forward to the discussions we’ll have because of it.
My first reply wasn’t published, so I guess I won’t use the word “douchebag” in this one. Wearing Thin sounds like an entitled brat. Sugar’s response was very kind, but I felt like it was still too soft. My guess is that Wearing Thin has been spoken to in exactly that tone of voice her whole life – the soft, gentle, moderating tone that makes it possible for her to believe that she has a genuine complaint. That she is “being heard” even when her complaint is asinine.
Student loans are not crises. Everyone has them. And you, Wearing Thin, have an education in exchange for them. It wasn’t as if anyone took something from you and gave nothing back. You chose to go to college. That is the price you pay for college.
WT said, “I’m so angry with my parents for putting me in this circumstance instead of supporting me to get a graduate degree for my dream job, and I feel selfish about that.”
Your parents did not put you in any circumstances. You did. You feeling angry about it is fine – but just realize you’re being an entitled jerk. Everybody has blindspots and days when they’re the jerk, and today is your day. By framing yourself as a victim you are surely not being the vibrant young woman you want to be. You’re being a bitter pill.
Please grow up, WT. Please just pay your bills. Go to graduate school. Lots of commenters here have suggested ways to do it. Be the woman you want to be — not this person that I am sure you will be ashamed of in a few years’ time when you realize how utterly entitled and self-important you sound.
Perfectly said Sugar. We don’t ever know the cards we will be dealt. I had two amazing parents while I was going to college. They paid and even helped with housing. And then I got married young & they pulled the plug. Fast forward to now and I have a spotty graduate school degree – meaning I never graduated from two graduate programs and enough student loan debt to imagine I could be paying a mortgage on a small home in the mid west. I also sometimes get down on myself. I am in my early 30’s, divorced, one parent left and trying to be a writer. But it could be worse. And I have learned so much about myself along the way. A divorce and a death did not undo me. I kept on going & you will too!
I’d just like to point out that Americorps and Peace Corps are incredibly competitive programs. And, grants take a huge chunk of time to locate and write (never mind that the forms are usually impossible to decipher); what kind of job can you get that’ll feed/house you and allow you to apply for grants?!
I say the above knowing that I was extraordinarily fortunate. Through a combination of scholarships (both need & merit-based), grants, college jobs, and very small checks from my parents, I was able to pay for my undergraduate degree outright. No loans. I also went to an in-state school that was a half hour away from my parents (free meals and laundry). I could’ve gone to an Ivy League based on my academics, but I limited myself. Because I also had grown up poor, or at least lower middle class.
So, even though I was lucky, I’m also angry and resentful. The current student loan and higher education systems are so shitty. It feels like my entire generation has been scammed. And, don’t even get me started on the law school scam. My fiance is currently dealing with the aftermath of that. On and off unemployment for the past three years, ever since he graduated from a top 20 school…
My upbringing was more like Sugar’s than the letter writer’s, I put myself through university withfull-time work & $25K in student loans, and now I have a daughter. I understand the sentiment of wanting to give your children everything you never had, but doesn’t this conflict with the belief that the struggles you’ve endured made you the stronger person you are today? Where is the line between providing a better life for your children and raising an ignorant, entitled jerk?
Dear Sugar,
I am very moved by your column week after month, but I think you missed the point on this one. I didn’t see (and forgive me if I missed it) responding to the whole part of Wearing Thin’s letter,
“My relationship with my parents has always been rocky to the point that I’ve come to realize I’ll never get any emotional support from them. I am grateful they were able to help me with an undergraduate degree. However, I have never been close to them, and am often weary of their intentions. Our phone conversations are 100% concerning student loans rather than me as a person.
“I struggle with student loans often defining me. I know my education, student loans, and occupation will define to me an extent. However, I am more than my job and these items combined. I am a 25 year-old woman who strives for the greatest possible quality of life and to be the best person she can be. But more often than not, I am defined by my “student loan†identity. It is on my mind when I grab a beer, buy new clothes, and in general, live my life. I do not spend excessively and have always had careful money management. Yet this situation extends beyond any careful money management.”
I am 51 years old and it took until I was in my 40’s that I stopped hating myself so much. Why the hell did I hate myself so much? Why was I so hard on myself? 20 years of therapy and navel gazing helped me realize that so many negative messages were hard wired into me by my parents. They sat on my shoulders whispering these un-truths into my ears for decades. It was a succession of acts of faith, fierce desire to heal and lots of tears and even more hard, dirty work, to find the roots of these hard-wirings and do my best to dismantle them.
It sounds to me that Wearing Thin has taken over the job of self-punishment from her emotionally unavailable parents who (implied in her words above) don’t see her as the person she sees or would like to see herself.
So from my reading of this letter, which I am quite sure you put a whole lot more into than I have, I take first and foremost the deeper issue which is healing the broken parts of self.
And for Wearing Thin, I found that having a practice of sitting quietly as many days of the week as I can and (at best) *feeling* what I”m grateful for and (at least) making a laundry list of what is good and right in my life has done much to promote joy, gratitude and happiness in my life.
And maybe I missed the mark entirely.
for what it’s worth…
Spot on Sugar. Ultimately, what it comes down to Wearing Thin is that this is your life, your choices and your decisions and it is up to you to make the things you want in your life happen. I don’t know many things that are easy about life but you can find purpose and meaning in EVERY experience. This is the time for you to put on your big-girl panties and take responsibility for yourself and for your choices. Be grateful that your parents were able to pay for some of your education because many, many, many of us were not that fortunate. Like Sugar says it’s just money…and life? Life will be an unhappy place if you let money become the sum of your identity.
From reading your newsletter, Sugar, I know that you have more immediate worries, such as making sure the Baby Sugars have health insurance, but methinks that you need to start socking away NOW for their college education, if you want them to have the college experience that Kate had. I know that you’re still paying off your student loans, but my financial advisor told me that one had to start saving for college for one’s children the moment they were born. With tuition rising much faster than the rate of inflation, it may be time to investigate those tax-free college saving vehicles.
Dear Sugar,
I think you are absolutely right in your response to the emotional content of this letter, as always. And…I think there is a larger social justice issue here that anyone carrying student debt ought to be aware of (and anyone who cares about economic justice as well). Student loans are the most predatory form of debt in our country now, lacking the other forms of standard consumer protection. Most young people do not understand the documents they are signing, and the college financial aid officers often profit from misleading young people into greater debt.
Anyone carrying student debt, or considering it, and anyone who is concerned about inequality should read the book called The Student Loan Scam. And please, Wearing Thin, look into the income based repayment plan. Student loans do not have to define you, and your life can be full and happy even as you work your way out. Take Sugar’s advice and free yourself, and then see how you can participate as a citizen rather than as a victim in this issue.
I am in Chile right now, where thousands of students, more than thousands, have been protesting in the streets weekly (and in spite of police crackdowns) for free education. They´re tired of expensive education, which perpetuates the sharply divided society of rich and poor. I completely support them.
At the same time it felt strange, at first, to walk through Santiago with the protestors. I graduated from an expensive college and I did it without any student debt because of my grandparents and parents. I am so lucky, so randomly privileged, to have attended that school, to be where I am now. I realized at the protest that even though my situation is very different from the protesting Chilean students´, I am right to be there supporting them, because their fight is one of national (and international) justice.
When I get back to California I´m going right to join Occupy Wall Street and the protesting UC students against tuition hikes.
Sugar, you are extraordinary!
Dear Sugar,
I am writing not because I think your advice to Wearing Thin was wrong –it was not–or even because I disagree with your tone– it is justified– but because I feel such sympathy for the letter-writer. I too share your pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps approach; your advice was on-target. But I think you missed the sorrow in Wearing Thin’s letter. I think you missed her need for comfort. I think that Wearing Thin was aching with questioning her own self-worth and longing to feel validated in her identity. The financial issues were tangential.
I don’t think that she was wallowing in privilege, and I don’t think she was unaware of her need to deal the cards she was dealt and live her life for the best. She said as much when she described her previous work to get herself out of her “deep, dark hole.†For you to say “You have to do it again†is facile and offers no comfort for her pain. We fall into self-pity when we feel uncared for. In those times, we know we need to pull ourselves up, and we will, but as we determinedly yank the fucking steering wheel to turn around and drive the fuck back out of the dead-end road, still we ache and grieve when we feel alone and uncomforted. Who does Wearing Thin have in her life who will comfort her and hold her hand as she drives out of self-pity and who will say “I’m here for you. It will be okay.†I didn’t hear those relationships in her words.
Usually your personal reflections as they relate to the letter-writer’s situation I find insightful and a good counter-balance; this time they felt a little too self-referential. I thought, “oh Sugar, it’s easy for you to say.†Poverty and abuse and abandonment and heroin and abortion and sixteen shitty but valuable jobs: you made it through, you’re on the other side now! You are a writer, as you always wanted, you have professional success and recognition and you do what you love. You have a devoted partner and family that both anchor and buoy you. Good for you! Those of us not quite there yet, we who are strapping on our boots for the 1000th time, we are not saying that we think we should be entitled to more or better. We are not denying valuable life experiences along the way. We are not necessarily even saying that what we have is unfair or undeserved. We are just saying, in the words of your letter-writer, we want to be “vibrant,†we are trying, but we are “having trouble keeping up any positive outlook.†I think those feelings deserved more kindness, more love, than what you offered.
There’s an aspect to this letter I was surprised to see that Sugar didn’t address: “My relationship with my parents has always been rocky to the point that I’ve come to realize I’ll never get any emotional support from them.”
When I was eleven, I went to sleepaway camp for the first time. And I noticed all the girls around me in the bunkhouse getting care packages from home. My mother did not see the point of care packages. So every letter I wrote to her that summer contained a request: can you send me this? Can you send me that? Under all that, the thought: if you love me, isn’t this what you’ll do?
The letter writer acknowledges that she is not emotionally close to her parents. As much as she dislikes the conversations over the loans, I wonder if she doesn’t see these loans last thing that lets her parents provide for her, lets them be the giving parents and her be the receiving child. You may not be able to give me emotional support, but you’re my parents; can’t you do at least this for me?
And do we all recall that Sugar spends her time and energy and love answering questions for us, her readers and some of her biggest fans, without getting “paid”?
When I was training as a mediator, I was taught that one of the keys to a successful resolution is to help the participants disentangle their positions from their interests. For example, someone’s position might be that they want their noisy neighbor to be quiet at night. Their underlying interest, however, might be to have a safe, tranquil place to live. It is often possible to reach a satisfactory understanding between parties when their interests have been honored and met, even if the positions they took at the beginning of the negotiations are ultimately not.
I think this is relevant for Wearing Thin, because while she states her position, (“I’m so angry with my parents for putting me in this circumstance instead of supporting me to get a graduate degree for my dream job…”) she touches on some things that lead me to believe her interests lie in a different direction, (“My relationship with my parents has always been rocky to the point that I’ve come to realize I’ll never get any emotional support from them”). Although I cannot say what these interests are, my sense is that they have far more to do with wanting to feel emotionally supported by her parents than with more apparent financial matters. I would encourage Wearing Thin to examine the ways in which the issue of student loans has become a proxy for her to feel anger toward her parents for what she perceives as an emotionally barren relationship.
That is not to say that debt isn’t a genuine major stress! But it seems as though the normal debt stress is being compounded and confused with pain from unrelated dashed hopes and unmet expectations. I would hate for the LW to pay off her debt (at 43 or otherwise!) only to discover that she feels the same sense of anger because it wasn’t about the debt after all.
I grew up in a working class suburb and the kids I went to high school with that now own their own homes learned a trade. It cost them a fraction of what a four-year degree, let alone graduate school, would’ve cost and the only debt they have is a mortgage. I think the problem among very literate people is that they inherit their ideas about living a literary life from a literary establishment populated almost exclusively by members of the upper and upper middle classes. They naturally emulate that lifestyle even when it’s impractical because there isn’t really another model. General contractors and electricians don’t get to wear tweed and sweatervests to work. They have to come home filthy and tired every day. Poststructuralism is what they have to clean up after knocking down a building. And this, I think, is why there isn’t another model. Doing what is actually economically best for yourself means sacrificing some illusions. It means losing access to some arenas. It means speaking a plainer, unvarnished language that won’t necessarily resonate with people fortunate enough to successfully emulate a lifestyle model that costs a fortune. Your working class novel about being an X-ray technician will rot in the slush pile because the wealthy readers interning at publishing houses won’t identify with or even recognize the world it represents. This is more than I originally meant to say. I guess this thread touched a nerve.
what’s so special about zero anyway? some people have positive amounts of money, others negative. if there weren’t debtors nobody would have anything due.
Just wanted to note that while serving in the Americorps/Peace Corps is a nice idea, you are truly VOLUNTEERING. I know several Americorp members. They have meager stipends and all are on food stamps. So while you might be able to temporarily defer your loan or you might get some of it canceled…I don’t think there’s much of a financial incentive. Personally, I do almost the same thing as the Americorp members, except I have a salary.
something about this dear sugar column struck me wrong. i love this column but i think that sugar took wearing thin way too personally. although i loved the “You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding†and thought that was great, i felt like the rest of it was pretty surprising. and not in a good way.
while i also found wearing thin’s letter eking on to the privileged side and maybe confusing a bit of personal responsibility with rage against the machine, this is one time i thought sugar’s column was off base in it’s advice. yes, everyone needs to critically examine their privilege but i find telling someone to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” very unhelpful. it’s an defensive saying and attitude, that implies it’s own privilege. it says: “well, if i can do it, why can’t you?”. and the reasons why you could do and someone else can’t do are really not for you to measure. you have the privilege of whatever strength you have, which you have for whatever reasons you do, and it is irresponsible to assume that everyone has access to whatever it was that gave you the power to triumph over your circumstances. is this person able bodied? is she a person of color? is she LGBT? is she ill (mentally or physically)? i don’t know. these are just a few things i could think of that might make the phrase “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” pretty condescending and privileged.
i mean, sugar, you’re a successful writer who lives by her writing, right? that’s so amazing. from reading your column i can see that it was really tough for you to get to where you are and because you did work so hard, maybe you didn’t stop to gut check your own privilege before writing this response. i mean, even getting a college loan in the first place is an experience of privilege many never have.
i wish that advice in the vein of “just be tough” would be stricken from use because i’ve almost never seen it help anyone but instead seen people internalize it to the point where they make it something that they cling to like a mantra anytime they can’t deal with anything; a bad job, a bad relationship, grief over the death of a parent. and it makes everything all their fault because they can’t just “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” and be tough.
it’s amazing what you’ve accomplished sugar. but for a socialist, this is a pretty capitalist response. that kind of mentality plays into a lot of what i hear being shot back at OWS protestors these days by people who are either born to privilege or think because they “pulled themselves up by their bootstraps” they are entitled to judge other peoples financial predicaments.
i really appreciate your column. i love it, actually. but this bothered me enough that i had to say something about it.
It does sound as if the student loans are acting as a stand in for the parental relationship. Most of us need to unhook ourselves from what we’ve decided money means, whether it means love, or greediness, or lack of support, or whatever else it might mean for us. Otherwise, we can sit in an unending feeling of ‘lack’ that doesn’t have anything to do with reality. A while ago, I read the Soul of Money by Lynne Twist (http://www.soulofmoney.org/about/about-the-book/), and recently Geneen Roth’s Lost and Found: Unexpected Revelations About Money. Both of them can be helpful in showing us all the hidden meanings we’ve attached to money so we can break free of them.
Sugar, I also think you missed the point. She’s feeling unsupported and unseen. This isn’t so much to do with student loans as much as orientation and being valued.
This is also a pretty Americacentric article. There are many countries out there where university education is free. US students shoulder more debt than almost any other nation. In the UK we have recently introduced university fees and we look at the US situation and see the peril taking on your model. So, while I acknowledge that the article covers many topics, don’t labour under the illusion that your fee/debt system is not looked on with fascinated horror. Your students *are* in a horrible mess. It is a crazy situation where the nation is asking you to still be paying off your student loans in your 40s. Despair might well be an appropriate response.
once again, sugar is right on the money.
i have two babies, aged 3 and 1, and almost immediately after their births, i opened 529 accounts for them. my husband and i sock away $50 a month into each account automatically, and deposit chunks throughout the year as well because we love them and want to raise them knowing that their education is important.
however, some of the best advice i received was from my financial advisor that when i wanted to up the monthly amount i deposit told me “up what you save for your own retirement before your kid’s college funds. your kids can take student loans.” in an age where pensions are all but a thing of the past, and both my husband and i are small business owner who WORK OUR ASSES OFF day in and day out to give our children the best, i took his advice and never looked back.
we want the best for our children and do everything we can to ensure they will be given the best life possible. but we’re also trying to raise them without the sense of entitlement that so many children are raised with today.
i’ve worked hard my whole life. my girls are going to be raised to appreciate what they’ve been given but not to expect anything.
These are all great and thoughtful comments. As a very middle-class parent of a very middle-class child just now looking at college, I do have to side with many of the younger commenters here and gently remind Sugar, whom I adore, and others that “student loans” and even “going to college” now means something utterly and completely different than what you think it means. Like Sugar, I too had love but almost no financial support from my parents for college, and I paid for my only, undergraduate degree until well after I had babies, but that is absolutely nothing at all like what is going on now with college tuition, which has increased 400% in the last 20 years. 400%! So multiply your loans by 400% and then figure out how much of a burden they’d be on you. There’s a reason why this topic is on the front page of the New York Times as I type (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/education/duncan-calls-for-urgency-in-lowering-college-costs.html?_r=1&src=rechp), and there’s a reason why it’s a cornerstone of the #Occupy movement. You could “work around” a 1980s or 1990s student loan with savoire faire and ramen and an occasional pair of expensive boots. You cannot, in any way shape or form, escape for a single moment from a 2010 student loan. We are eating our young, and that, I think, is what is wearing thin Wearing Thin.
Great post, and I say that from the perspective not only of someone who spent half my life paying off my loans but also as the mother of college-aged kids who is struggling to pay for their education. It sucks that to send a kid to college you have to sell your soul.
Funny thing is I’m glad I grew up on my own dime. I was surrounded by rich kids who all ended up with no sense of the value of life and the insignificance of wealth. I never felt poor, even when I was at my poorest.
I once met a really wealthy Arab college student who told me of the weight of obligation he felt towards his father because of his financial support/control. He said “my father’s money is the most expensive money of all.” I never forgot that. (He also said his father had a boat with wings…aka sails, never forgot that either! 🙂 )
Sugar,
Fantastic response yet again. This is coming from a woman of privilege. I graduated without any student loans, worked only summers as a lifeguard and camp counselor and was off to London to work and travel in Europe just after graduation (sadly no new car). When I got to europe I wanted to be independent and had saved $3000 to live off of and travel with. What I and my other travel companions didn’t realize was that London was uber expensive and with the horrible exchange rate and deposit and rent due upfront- my money was gone. I quickly got a retail job which covered 1/2 my expenses but then met my neighbors on the dole. The dole paid their rent and utilities, but if they wanted anything extra- in between jobs- they had to hustle. They taught me how to hustle too. I made strange deliveries, worked in an illegal bakery, had friends ship me cigarettes to sell, would work at clubs for tips and drinks to get the guys in the door. But I never asked my parents for money- and I made it.
I lived in Europe for 8 months and traveled for 2- all on my own. Hustling (or my version of it) you meet tons of people that are all on the lookout like you. We hosted many out of towners only to call in the favor of couch surfing when we traveled. I learned so much about life without barley a dime to my name.
Although- I was very lucky. I had a safety net a phone call away. Maybe that allowed me to move forward with less fear than the average person but it was still terrifying at first. Out of my family, I am the most versatile child. I have moonlighted as a chef, worked in sales and now I am at a law firm making really decent money (I might go back to school to teach!). I was the 1st child in my family to purchase a house with my own money and I still have never asked my parents for a dime. Would it be different if I had student loans? I’m not sure. My siblings were all “set up” the same way and they have received much more money from my parents because they always ask.
A few years ago I was given a patio for my house for Christmas. I thought this was a strange yet excessive gift but my mother explained later that it was a way to “even out” everything because she felt bad that she had given my other siblings so much money while I wouldn’t accept their help. I have a sibling that still resents the “guilt patio” yet she doesn’t own any property to put a patio on.
I think pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is something everyone should strive for- independence is the best! The poster seems like a capable individual that can do it all by herself- she just needs a push and perhaps her parents are trying to push her into being a responsible adult. Children are pushing to be adults sooner while young adults would like to go back to being children. There are tons of grants and scholarships available to grad students and weird jobs that you can always work. I know several now, one moonlights as a crossfit trainer and babysitter/nanny. My weird jobs and non-jobs have absolutely contributed to the person I am today. They have made me more grateful for what I have and before my father died he said to me- at least I don’t have to worry about you. This makes me incredibly proud.
Help pass H.R. 2028 http://www.change.org/petitions/the-subcommittee-on-courts-commercial-and-administrative-law-pass-hr-2028-the-private-student-loan-bankruptcy-fairness-act-of-2011
Graduates swimming in private student loan debt are finding it increasingly difficult to make their monthly payments. Private banks don’t offer economic hardship programs, deferments, and consolidations. That’s why we need to pass H.R. 2028, a bill that will help graduates with unmanageable private student loan debt file for bankruptcy.
On July 11, 2011, Speaker of the House John Boehner referred H.R. 2028 to the Subcommittee on Courts, Commercial, and Administrative Law, where it has been sitting, neglected, ever since. In the meantime, graduates with private debt continue to suffer, while businesses freely file for bankruptcy. Tell the Subcommittee on Courts, and Administrative Law to pass H.R. 2028, bringing the bill one step closer to becoming law.
Awesome as always! But I wonder what kind of grad degree she is interested in pursuing. The general rule of thumb from academia is that you only pay for a graduate degree if it is the kind that pays for itself. MBA, Law, MD. Most graduate schools will fund (tuition and a shabby stipend) their worthy grad students with potential.
I suddenly (shockingly) became a single parent with no financial support when my son was 15 months old, and thank god for grad school, because there were things like stipends and flexible schedules and you could teach a double schedule of whatever basic topic you know about and make $4k more a year. Because my grad degree isn’t the kind that reaps rewards at the end (not a lawyer, doctor, financier), it was completely supported. When I graduated everything that was mine (including the kid and the dog), fit into a very small car. Now my son is in grad school, and honestly, he hasn’t needed any financial support, because most grad departments will at least fund to the most basic level anybody who has academic potential. Sorry to sound harsh, but if you have to pay for graduate school, you have to consider whether it is the right course of action. (Excluding professional programs.)
I think the column and the comments are all really interesting. As the mother of a college student (who chose an in state University to avoid excessive debt) and also the middle aged daughter of parents who communicated through money, and emotional absence, I relate to the writer.I used to refer to it as hush money. I stopped taking it when I realized this. Sugar mentions the abundance of emotional support from her family. This (as a few other respondents have pointed out) is what is lacking in Wearing Thin’s relationship with her parents. It is what every child longs for. Parental conversation is “always” about her “debt.” And I just want to add, that after a lifetime of staying out of debt, I went through treatment for Stage 4 cancer last year. I spent time during treatment fighting the insurance company’s claim of a pre-existing condition. I won, but it still doesn’t cover thousands and thousands of dollars in medical debt. The good news is that I have had clear scans and am alive to love my children. I will die with this debt, and I am separate from it. It is also aligned with the Occupy movement, all of a piece. We must reform health care and the predatory superstructure of the insurance/banking oligarchy. Take care of yourself, but yes, take to the streets. It is enough. It is time.
I think there is an important point here that was missed. Many of our parents, often people who had to pull themselves out of muck and mire, wanted us to have that shining college life that Sugar herself wants for her children.
They told us, our entire lives, that they would make sure it would be better for us than it was for them. We wouldn’t have to work in the mines (my dad) or clean vomit for 8 hours straight (my mom). They would make sure.
So when we were fresh-faced little 18-year-olds, they looked at the price of tuition (“Gosh, exponential tuition hikes mean our savings won’t even cover half of this.”) and were given to understand by the ever-trustworthy bankers and college admissions officers that everyone got school loans, that they were totally manageable. Yeah, it was different than when my parents were young, but it was the only way they could make sure we didn’t end up in the mines and vomit.
A lot of the hurt, and the resentment, and the anger that my generation feels is not that we have school loans (contrary to popular belief, we want to take responsibility for our education), but that our parents, and our young-selves, were taken-in by a dream that, in the 70s, would have been feasible and safe. But in the early 2000s was not. My anger with my parents is that they didn’t protect me from that, that they co-signed those loans being fooled to think it was the only way, and that it was okay because every other parent they knew was doing the same thing for their kids. I’m angry at myself that I followed them, blindly. That I trusted. But then, would I have wanted to be the kind of child that didn’t trust my loving parents? Didn’t believe in their dreams and hopes for betterment and education?
On the one hand, I think that Sugar deals with the individual problem in this column very well. The shit is what it is, you’ve got to just soldier on. On the other hand, I think she totally misses the point. The heart of this letter is the same heart that is roaring in protests around the globe, and Sugar has patted it on its head, said, “Deal with it, kiddo,†and passed it by.
Oh Sugar, how I love you and let me count the ways…but on this issue, you have missed the point. Having parents who couldn’t do anything was much better than having parents who could, who refused, or changed lanes midway. Student loans are to our culture what indentured servitude was to people in the 1800s. You don’t know my story but…I saved and fought and worked for my education, entering Law school with a plan and with a financial plan, ultimately killed by my mother’s vengeance. I am 49. I live in Japan and am current on a 9 percent loan that is current after 22 years. Let me begin to show the ups and downs of that burden…and there IS a difference knowing there will be no help. “No help” is better than the scenario that help appears and yet disappears, throwing you further down a dark tunnel of aloneness and an indentured life. Seeing pictures of malnourished Indian refugees seemed to have more hope in thier eyes than cash strapped, indentured by their education, students. More is need here to build a bridge of understanding. Trust me dear sugar, for as sweet as you are, I am the sour bitter tast that may give you depth.
Dear Wearing Thin:
Quit your bitching and start living. Sugar’s right. And that sort of sucks, but it sort of rocks, too. The student loan situation in the US is effed up, to a point where worrying is just not worth it. The only time you need to be ‘defined’ by your student loan is when you pay it once a month. Other than that? Numbers to be forgotten. Because if you let what you don’t have eat you alive, then, well, you’ve just been eaten alive.
And Wearing- I do understand. I’m twenty three with loans. Soon, I’m sure, I’ll be going through the same thing you are to relieve my parents of the financial burdens my sisters and I created with our desire for higher education. And you know what? I still bought myself a new computer. We’re only human.
So, so good Sugar. Love this line, especially: “They forced me to be resilient, to sacrifice, to see how little I knew, and also how much.”
I think I’m a little confused, because to me “co-signing” on a loan does not mean making payments on that loan. It sounded to me like Wearing’s parents want to be removed from the loan – possibly so that they have less debt on paper for future mortgages, etc.? Depending on the setup of the loan, that wouldn’t be possible, so Wearing would have to refinance, which could mean higher payments AND could mean that the loans cannot be deferred if she were to go to grad school. Wearing, I hope you’ll chime in to clarify.
Whatever the answer, I have to say that I understand your frustration. Especially if it was not made clear to you at the beginning that this was going to be the arrangement. I wonder if Sugar is thinking of her own monthly payments, and not considering the different impact that your likely much, much higher payments would have. My required monthly loan payment after graduation in 2003 was $50. I paid more than that whenever possible. I was just extremely lucky to get in-state tuition, to attend college right before the dramatic tuition increases set in, and to have parents able to pay for half of my tuition. So my loans were very small. I don’t know what I would have done with a $300/month payment, which I think is the “average” these days.
But the heart of Sugar’s answer was right on – this is your situation. That is a fact. So be angry about it if you have to, but try to get to a positive place with it when you can, and do NOT accept that it defines you or determines your future in a negative way. Take advantage of any and every loan assistance program out there – income-based, particularly. And then accept that you might have to live with roommates you don’t love, and not have a car, and make your own coffee every day. If you go to grad school, you’ll have plenty of company in this lifestyle!
43? 44? I wish!
I am 32 and will be repaying my debt until age 60. I had no financial support from my parents, either. I worked 20 hours a week throughout college.
It’s even worse for today’s graduates, who often owe upwards of $60,000 after getting a BA from a public university (I should know, I work at one). These students have grants and scholarships and jobs. And they still owe. And there are no jobs. Certainly none with benefits. Many of these students will be stuck in the equivalent of Sugar’s pipe cleaner factory forever. And them’s not union jobs no more.
Though the advice given is useful for the individual situation, and I share the author’s innate sense of the importance of gumption, Sugar misses the bigger picture. At heart, this debt-slave despair is what the entire Occupy movement is about.
Dear WT,
I too felt emotionally and financially unsupported by my parents when I was your age. My mother even told me to stay with an abusive boyfriend when I asked her if I could move back home to escape him. I was so hurt and angry. I left them and my country, went to SIUC, (which may not be a great grad school in some ways, but was practically free), I cared for myself, I found a man who would love me more than I thought they ever had and I loved him back, I found friends, I pursued my dream (despite my parents assuring me it was hopeless) got my dream job, and over time have learned how to ask my parents to show me that they love me. They always did, they just couldn’t show it, and I didn’t have the courage (before I saved myself) to ask them to. All this is to say, do everything you can to find love and support in other places, but try not to give up on your parents. Over time, you’ll change and so will they. I’m not saying it’s easy, but it’s possible. I forgave my parents for what they couldn’t give me, and learned how to take what they could. Good luck. You can do it.
what makes you think you’re going to get a dream job just because you go to grad school? have you not been paying attention to our country’s economic woes? my daughter is working in a bookstore, and that’s after summers abroad, top school and all the rest. and your parents only co-signed; you gave no indication they agreed to take on the debt. come on now, chin up. you’ll be okay.
I agree that feeling entitled to her parents’ money is not the way to go. But when is enough enough, Sugar? You went to school in a slightly easier time, I’m assuming, since this is the hardest time in nearly 70 years. We should all have a right to an education, and the fact is that we just don’t anymore, at least not without debilitating loans, and if we all just turn the other cheek and live our lives, nothing is ever going to change. Living your life is always better for you, but sometimes you have to fight for other people, too. Why not point this anger where it should be: at a government and society that has decided not to invest in education anymore, that has decided to give up on supporting young people. There are a million horror stories out there — I, for one, lost all the money I was told I’d have from my grandmother to pay for school when the housing bubble burst, and now, because of bad timing, I’m almost $100K in the hole. Is that fair? No. Am I angry at her? Of course not. Am I angry? Yes. Should I just live my life and get over myself? That sounds like Bill O’Reilly talking. I think I should channel that anger to going after the crooks who have robbed a generation of their future, and who robbed my grandmother of everything she was worth.
Sure some people need to do some boot-strap-pulling, but some people are in such dire straits because of student loans they could pull the bootstraps right off their thrift-store boots and they’d still be sinking. Expensive cowboy boots, sweet pea? By the time I got my loans back into deferment, I weighed less than I did as a mile-runner on the track team in high school.
There may be a sense of entitlement here, but god, a lot of people graduating now are filled with real fear.
Dear Sugar,
I need to thank you for being direct with my letter. Self pity does not drive anyone forward, and your reminder was greatly needed.
However, you misunderstood the terms I stated in my letter. A cosigner is considered a secondary borrower on a loan. I, the individual, am the primary borrower on the student loans. I, the primary borrower, make payments on my student loans. My parents have never paid any portion of my student loans for me. (Though, my parents are required to only I can no longer afford to.) If I implied otherwise in my letter, I apologize. I continue to pay half to one third of my paycheck to student loans as I have been since I was 21.
I’d like to thank Carrie Ann for her comment, “It sounded to me like Wearing’s parents want to be removed from the loan – possibly so that they have less debt on paper for future mortgages, etc.? Depending on the setup of the loan, that wouldn’t be possible, so Wearing would have to refinance, which could mean higher payments AND could mean that the loans cannot be deferred if she were to go to grad school.†Thank you, Carrie Ann for recognizing this. You are 100% correct.
Sugar, please also read KP’s comment. I am not anger I have to pay student loans. I am not anger I will never own a house. I am not anger I live with roommates, make my own coffee in the morning, or buy clothes from thrift stores. I am anger at the system we currently have for every aspect of our lives- housing, education, banking, healthcare. It is rigged to be against us.
I hope one day Baby Sugars is able to have the college experiences similar to Kate’s. I really do. I hope one day you do not need to sit down 17 year old Baby Sugars to explain terms such as ‘cosigner,’ ‘consolidation,’ and ‘capitol interest.’ I hope Baby Sugars giggles when they hear the name ‘Sallie Mae’ and asks why she always being referred to as a bitch.
I wrote this letter before the Occupy movement began and since then have joined. In fact, I cried out of happiness when my city took to the streets. I am PROUD to be a part of this movement. I finally have a voice.
@Jonas Thank you! You are so right when you say “Doing what is actually economically best for yourself means sacrificing some illusions.”
I am disappointed that so few members of my young generation value the vocational track that Jonas mentioned in his comment. We need electricians, contractors, chemical plant workers, farm laborers, and many other positions for which a college education is not required. But alas, no one wants to get dirty or climb a telephone pole anymore, even though that job might pay much more than the one-in-a-hundred chance at a publishing internship. We fear there is no glory in the dirt, no chance for advancement in the sewers, no white picket fence hidden in an electrical closet. There is great value in these jobs, but they are not for us because we feel we are better than that. Why?
I think we are apt to forget that a college education is not a right, it’s a privilege. You are choosing to go above and beyond to learn more about the world around you, in whatever subject you fancy. This comes at a price. You may feel that you were misled, but higher education has never been a guarantee of a better life. It is little more than a very expensive gamble that the skills you acquired will help you “get ahead” of those that made a different choice. Yes, many years ago the odds were better, but that is not the case today, and Sugar says it best: “You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt.” I hear no judgement in her words.
Here is my bottom line: I am not entitled to a better life simply because I am my parents’ child. My parents may give me a head start, or they might beat me down instead. I cannot control where or how I begin my life, but I am always in complete control of where I end up. I find great joy in this. Wearing Thin, do not resent your parents for raising your stakes. They are the load weighing you down, not your student loans. Be grateful that they are giving you the opportunity to be rid of them. I know it is hard to fend for yourself, and I know how lonely it is with no emotional support. But I also know that the pride that comes from defeating such obstacles far outweighs the burden I bore.
I think this is what Sugar meant, too. I don’t think she wrote to Wearing Thin (and the rest of us) from an “I made it, why can’t you?” pedestal. I think she wrote these words from the “You’ve already come so far, keep pushing yourself, I am right here with you” parallel swim lane. I am there too, and I am cheering you on, WT! I know you can do it.
This letter writer could be anyone in the generation “Y” – who are being hit harder with higher education costs and lending problems – even harder than folks like me from generation X, who are still – at almost forty – paying off student loans that look endless.
I think that deferments can only make the problem worse, but for anyone who wants to attend grad school full-time, that’s usually the solution to the money-flow-woes.
I am always so touchy with students in MFA programs, I worry about them finding jobs and paying the bills after graduation, the same way I worry about myself finding a job and paying the bills, even as their adjunct professor. (PS Adjuncting does not provide a living wage, yet it is the reality for most folks with graduate degrees these days, unless those graduate degrees are in law or medicine.)
In short, I sympathize, and this letter writer is more or less a representative of a huge wave of young, talented people starting off their lives with enormous debt. It hasn’t killed me so far, but it’s not a great thrill-ride, either. I hope the student loan and education costs problems are going to be taken seriously by the folks in charge soon.
Sugar, you are usually so great. But on this one, I feel you need to spend some time at your local Occupy movement and get a handle on the deeper political economic issues that are confronting this writer. American college students are being subjected to some of the harshest austerity measures and most predatory loan regimes that they have ever faced. It is wrong to respond as if this is your writer’s private crisis. It is a national disaster, and no amount of self-help can fix it.
Is the purpose of the “Occupy” movement to enable everyone to go to Harvard without paying for it?
The problem is not that everyone can’t afford to go to expensive schools. It’s that our society does not acknowledge that those who go to expensive schools are not better or more deserving of respect–they are, with the exception of a tiny percentage, just richer, or willing to spend a huge amount of money. That’s all. It shouldn’t make them more attractive job candidates or more worthy of social stature. But at the moment it does, and everyone who complains that they have to pay student loans to go to these schools, or their lives are worthless, are perpetuating this elitist fantasy.
I went to a city college. My father’s income made the financial aid administrator laugh, so I was granted financial aid–very small, but enough to cover the low cost of city college tuition. I worked my way through school to pay for rent, utility bills, and food, and thus did not have time to complete the Honors Seminar because it involved meeting at 3pm every week to philosophize with other students for hours at a time. I hungered for a big life to nurture the writer I knew was inside me, as I filed insurance papers for hours on end. I never stop feeling saddened that I did not go to the shiny college of my dreams.
But I have zero student loans. There are consequences for every choice we make. I have to work extra-hard to convince employers of my worth, and wonder if I’d be a better writer if I had mingled with the finest minds of our generation in a rarefied atmosphere. But I have no student loans, and the truth is that I had wonderful teachers who are respected in the field, whose words stay with me to this day. If I had gone to Harvard or Princeton, I would be deeply in debt but have bragging rights and perhaps know a third language? Who knows. It was the road not taken. All I know for certain is that if I had chosen to shoulder the cost of Princeton or Harvard, that would have been my responsibility, and I’d have been signing those documents with my eyes open.
The world is not fair as it is, but life involves accepting the consequences of our choices. If “Occupy” seeks to abolish all consequences and complexities in life, it will not succeed, and it will not be taken seriously.
@Silverleaf, no, I don’t think that “everyone can go to Harvard for free” is the goal of the Occupy movement. It is a big and diverse movement, but I have yet to hear anyone entertain such an unrealistic demand. What I like about this movement is its reasonableness. Food, education, housing, and health are human rights. This country, if it chose to do so, could feed, house, educate, and care for every citizen.
I am a student in a public university too, making no money and putting wages together from whatever work I can find. I accept that some part of my life circumstances result from my own choices. At the same time, there are other forces at work that shape what is possible in life for you and me. The country’s fiscal policies and political choices are not your doing or mine, but we can work to change them. I am working with the Occupy movement because the terms of making and enjoying a life are becoming untenable for regular people, like writer of this letter. Hope you will consider joining.
I’m really surprised by some of the responses you’ve gotten, Sugar. Frankly it looks like there are lot of privileged people with a whole lot of guilt and very little experience with hunger commenting on this thread but I’ll try to assume otherwise. And I will say this – Sugar was not unkind. But she did shine a light on some harsh realities of life (that’s LIFE – not college life) that a lot of people have obviously never experienced much less contemplated.
Her response was mainly directed at WT’s original letter which said:
“I am a 25 year-old woman who strives for the greatest possible quality of life and to be the best person she can be. But more often than not, I am defined by my “student loan†identity. It is on my mind when I grab a beer, buy new clothes, and in general, live my life. I do not spend excessively and have always had careful money management. Yet this situation extends beyond any careful money management.”
WT’s perspective is unfortunately very narrow. She needed to see a bigger picture full of future possibility and Sugar’s response offered that. The financial details really don’t amount to much in the big picture Sugar was trying to paint. I think WT’s issues with her parents run much deeper than she indicated but I can’t read her mind. I can only read her words.
I’m a strong supporter of the “Occupy” movement and it bothers me that anyone would think Sugar has somehow aligned herself against it when she suggests that we’re not “defined” by student loans and points out that, “Self-pity is a dead end road.”
Sugar’s voice is the kind of voice that starts revolutions. She doesn’t end them. Sugar’s the voice of positive change and change starts from within. Self pity, self absorption and denying the privileges that a college education provides will get you absolutely nowhere. And unfortunately a college eduction is often the result of privilege or damn good luck. It’s just a sad fact of life that we’re all not granted the luxury of a college degree when we’re born into this world. Sugar did not say that she supports that reality. She only suggested that those of us that can’t afford it can still strive for it. And those of us who will never have a college degree are not defined by it because eduction is more than ivory towers, professors and degrees.
The University of Life can give you an incredible education. And your local library and used bookshop are filled with books that will change your life and teach you more than half the professors you’ll meet in your lifetime. If you take the time to search Youtube you’ll be amazed at how many prestigious colleges now offer their expensive wisdom online free of charge. A degree is a piece of paper. It doesn’t make you a better person and it definitely doesn’t define you. Your poverty and your wealth don’t define you either. Your actions do. And a good job or a “dream job” is a gift that few of us ever receive and a college degree doesn’t guarantee you one.
I hope that formal education will become more affordable and easier to achieve in the future. I also hope the Occupy movement will shine a light on predatory loan regimes as well as the poverty that effects countless young people who will never be able to afford college, the rising number of high-school dropouts and the sorry state of our public school system. But in the meantime I think it’s a disservice to Sugar that people are reading her words with the same narrow view that she was obviously trying to get WT to see beyond. I said it before but I’ll say it again, Sugar is a voice of revolution. Sugar is the voice of positive change. And sometimes change can be damn painful.
I hear a lot of judgment toward the letter writer in Sugar’s response and in the comment thread. Also a lot of self-righteousness. Almost none of it acknowledges the fact that LW’s conversations with her parents are entirely about student loans. She never said that her parents are paying the loans and as her follow-up post clarifies, she herself is making the payments at great sacrifice. She feels that her parents see her as these loans and not as a person, and she sees herself as these loans. It is incredibly difficult to shake off this kind of toxic baggage. Compassion, please!
What I think is strange is that Sugar said, “You must separate the global injustice (why are some shackled by student loans while others aren’t?) from the individual reality…” and spent a good deal of her answer addressing Wearing Thin’s supposed sense of global injustice. Except Wearing Thin never asked that question. She never asked why some are shackled with student loans while others aren’t. She never asked anything even a little bit like that. Her letter wasn’t about how easy her peers had it or how she felt entitled to, or envious of, the hand any of them had been dealt. Sugar MADE UP that question on Wearing Thin’s behalf, maybe because she was anxious to launch into the long story about herself (and Kate).
Sugar asks, “What is a student loan identity?”
I think it’s probably pretty similar to an “extremely expensive court-mandated spousal and child support” identity, or a “lien against my house for unpaid medical bills” identity. It’s knowledge of a huge burden that Wearing Thin not only carries with her, but may have to disclose in some very uncomfortable ways. Perhaps not all the commenters who are judging Wearing Thin are aware that many employers now run credit checks. If WT needs to refinance her large student debt under terms that amount to usury, as far as monthly payments and interest rate, that will show up on her credit report. In this climate, employers are less likely to hire someone with this type of debt burden, with the rationale that someone on the edge is less likely to be honest, and/or more likely to look for ways to screw the company, and/or likely to embarrass the company with the advent of a process server at some point in the future. These corporate attitudes are short-sighted and cruel, but they exist, which makes it even more difficult to pay off and get rid of that burden. (And this, too, is what the Occupy movement is about…the impossibility of getting out from under debt when debt itself is a barrier to finding a job.) I don’t know whether WT is in a relationship, but if she’s not, the loan debt is something she will need to disclose to potential partners. And again, there’s a difference between the loans as they originally were, and the disproportionate burden of the loans as they will need to be refinanced without her parents as cosigners.
But the heart of the original letter wasn’t really about money; it was about the fact that WT’s parents seem to see her as her student loans, rather than as a person. No wonder she feels like she “is” her student loan debt. This isn’t about money; it’s about how she feels in the world, due partly to the feedback loop she’s getting from people she loves. If she were ill, and her parents’ conversations focused only on that when they talked to her, I imagine she would feel as if she were her illness, and not their daughter. While Sugar is right that self-pity doesn’t help, the “pull out of it” advice didn’t really address the problem, which is WT’s feeling of her essential self being consumed by something that isn’t really “her,” and of that consumption limiting her future choices.
Thank you, Wearing Thin, for sending this letter. Thank you, Sugar, for responding to it honestly, from where you actually are. And thank the good grace and love of the world for wanting to be more whole, through conversations like this.
I’m with Maddy, Sarah, Mira, and e.r., among others. And I think that we are all still learning the language for dealing with the issue of class, privilege, and how money currently works. We’re in the early stages of this movement, and like all movements that seek to remake the world into a better place for EVERYONE, it’s been happening forever, and it’s going to be a long road still. It’s going to be hard to undo the lies and strange schemes of capitalism. It’s really hard to offer the same compassion to someone in the middle (which it sounds like WT is) when one came from the economic bottom and the middle might as well be the top (which is the actual location of someone with no student debt after college and a car as a graduation present.)
Wearing Thin, thank you for giving voice to the fear and distortion that our trust in and love for money has given us as a society. Thank you for sharing the struggle that might be really ordinary, and might not look difficult from the outside, but is so hard to bear on the day to day. Thank you for reminding us all that money and love have gotten twisted up inside all our relationships and that it is really, really hard to feel that your parents can’t see you and love you for who you are now and who you want to become. One commenter said put it in the knapsack and leave it at the side of the road. I think that’s right, but man is it hard.
I went bankrupt in the last few years and am slowly rebuilding after 40. I still have student debt. My social circle is mainly folks with way more financial resources, but I now have a “working class” (hourly wage, punch the clock) job that I love. I struggle with how to talk about the privilege that my family as a whole still has, but that I am now oddly estranged from. (long story, but my family and some friends were unable to help me financially for what seem to be mainly emotional and ideological issues rather than monetary resource limits. C’est la vie, but quel pain and agony and sense of betrayal.)
I am sometimes appalled now by what my “upper-middle” class friends consider “necessary.” But I’ve been there. I’m not there now. Now I know how long your socks can last (you can wear them in layers or turn them around when they get holes in the heels), how little you really need to eat in a day, how long you can go before the bill gets sent to collections, how long a pair of shoes can last. I know how to get on food stamps and medicaid in this country, while living alongside my friends who make 4x or more my salary.
I’m not saying “poor me.” I came from privilege and I’d say lucky me for getting this education so easily. After all, I’m not in jail or dead. There’s no debtor’s prison anymore. (I worried about that a lot for awhile.) And really, I’m not dead. Which is not to say I haven’t thought about that option. Without medicaid to back me up, I might have pursued it.
I’m just saying the system is screwed up. And it screws up everyone. (like racism, like sexism, like homophobia, like every ism and othering scary thing you can think of – and like them, in the air we’re breathing all the time.) The problem is not one of individual will and agency although it takes individual will and agency to live through the mess, and the grace and mercy and love of friends, whether in family form or chosen family form. The system is broken. Money should move so that it can help people live. It has no other good purpose. It is a tool, not an end or even a material.
The Gift by Lewis Hyde is one of the most hopeful, alternate picture books about commerce and art and money and making and community that I’ve ever read. Wearing Thin, I’d recommend it. It’s a rebuilding, reassuring picture of what is really true. Which is not student loan debt.
Thank you, Lara. It may have taken scrolling all the way to the bottom of this very long and, at times, quite vitriolic thread. But it was really nice to see something on this page that tried to fairly and humanely hear every point of view on this incredibly complex subject.
Wearing Thin –
I read your comment. I’m not sure where you are in this tangle now or what the rules are with loans which have been co-signed but I do have experience with parents who change the financial rules midway and who focus on that to the exclusion of everything else.
It is worth the price of getting out of that relationship. Do not ever accept money or credit-worthiness from your parents again. You didn’t know they would be like this, but now you do.
That said, it’s possible you have another option. I don’t know if a co-signer can force you to refinance. If they can’t, because your payments are good, you could just keep things as they are and get call display.
Thank you Lara, thank you WT, thank you Sugar.
LIke many readers, I am Sugar lover who found that this response fell flat. I think you missed WT’s overall point, but you sound out of touch with the current complexities of college costs and payments, Sugar. I’ve never heard you sound condescending, but you did in this one.
I’m an adjunct with significant student loan debt, so I understand a lot about what many of my undergraduate students are facing. I will be paying for my education until I am 65. Literally. I wish, Sugar, you had looked beyond your personal experience into current trends in the economy, employment, tuition patterns, and lending practices. Your own ability to buck up and pull through was not contingent merely on personal responsibility and fortitude, but also on economic forces beyond your control. And money might only be money, but student loan debt in the USA is treated differently than any other kind of consumer debt. You can declare bankruptcy, but you will still have to pay off your student loans. I hope you learn more about this for the sake of the baby Sugars, at least. You say that you hope to give them a college experience. If higher education continues on the path it is on now, the “college experience” will become the province only of the elite. Lara got it just right: the system is screwed up, and we all should take heed.
I appreciate everyone’s comments. I work at a college and you all have helped me recognize that the the current economic state makes higher education a stressful time for students (and parents).I have sensed a growing “distraction” that keeps students from diving into the academic side of college. I now recognize why some of my students can’t engage 100% with the activities of the classroom if they are working multiple jobs to stay in school or their families are suffering economically. I had my own student debt but now I realize the late 70’s, despite the energy crisis and the high cost of food and gas and other economic turmoil then, was followed by a time of hope. It is not too hopeful now. I support the Occupy movement. Again, thank you for this diverse discussion!
Lisa Says:
“The “college experience” will become the province only of the elite.”
What so many of you don’t seem to understand is that the “college experience” (as so many are determined to define it) has always been “the province of the elite” as well as the lucky few who manage to get by on scholarships often earned from things like military service, etc.
I’m amazed that so many educated people are unaware of this sad fact.
Although I think you said some brilliant things, sugar, I have to say that you missed some important points. As others have pointed out, the costs of college and the methods for paying for it are completely different than they were 25 years ago. You, and other commenters, have stated that they went to school on loans, and while you are still paying them off, it doesn’t affect you in your happiness. I wonder how you, and other commenters received these loans. It’s impossible that you received a private loan without someone else consigning for it- unless things were radically different then. So I think you have a nice, low-interest, easily defereable loan from the US government. Which is much much more manageable than a private loan. I have resentment towards my mother for not taking care if my college education. We were not rich, and she managed to put my brother and I through private elementary and secondary schools, but I don’t think she realizes how much a small amount (to her) like $2,500 would knock off 25k over my lifetime. Sugar, you say you want to provide a great college experience for your children, what responsibility do parents have to provide this? Should the ability to provide shelter, food, and a savings account for the child’s education be equal? Also, to everyone who suggests that “going to college is a choice,” understand that not going to college right now is a much worse choice than taking on loans- unemployment rates are far higher. I think the rising costs of tuition and non-existent job prospects may not be fully fathomable to everyone. On the ground floor, life ahead is uninspiring.
WT,
When your parents are no longer co-signers for your loans, and they ask you on the phone about your student loans, you get to answer them like it’s a pet or grandchild. “Mom, thanks for asking. The student loans are fine. Took it’s first steps just the other day.” and then go on and tell them about your funny roommates, the sparkling frost on the trees outside your window, or that you just joined a running club. Once they’re out, they no longer have a right to know anything about that topic.
If your roommates are in your situation, starving grads, then make them your family. Meet new people, make friends with your co-workers, and create a positive atmosphere for yourself by surrounding yourself with good people who understand you and have love to give, just as you do. when your parents call, it’ll be just as painful as it is now, but you’ll still have the emotional support of the people around you. You won’t need it as much from your parents. It’ll move from a need to a want.
WT, you have a heavy burden, but push yourself and drag yourself forward, and you will hatch a little WT inside, shining, and who can enjoy life despite any financial troubles.
Good luck.
Dear Sugar,
this post will save my life! I i’m 48,000 in student loan debt, only earn 1200 a month and have a monthly student loan payment of 600. i get to keep $45 a MONTH, because that’s all thats left after paying my loan, rent, gas, car insurance, food, ect. But thanx to this post, I am applying for an IBR, and am sure I will qualify. this will make a HUGE difference for me, thank you so much! i love your column, its the best. thank you.
Dear Wearing Thin,
I would like to add that one thing to Sugar’s letter, and that is that what I hear in this letter that is ostensibly about money is that it is really about love. You don’t feel loved or seen or appreciated by your parents. The one way that you have felt loved and supported is through their financial support, and now they are ripping that away. When you think about your parents and money, I suggest you substitute the word love and see what happens. For instance, “I wish my parents would give me more money (love).” Just notice that. And then you might want to say to yourself, “It is what it is….Now what?”
I agree with Sugar that when you are no longer financially dependent on your parents, you are free. In fact, both you and your parents are free. Which means you don’t have this money noose around your necks squeezing the life out of your relationship. When you are not financially dependent on them, you can break away. And when you’ve broken away long enough, and done your own work, and when your parents are freed of their obligation to you, then, after some time, you might be free to have something closer to the kind of relationship you wish to have with your parents, something that has nothing to do with money at all. I say this from experience.
It DOES totally suck to be poor. I say this from experience, too. But you will survive. And if you are tenacious about pursuing your dreams, you will thrive, too.
I’m with the people who think that Sugar missed the mark on this one.
First of all, she ignored the bit about her parents being unsupportive, even aside from the money issue. If you haven’t had to deal with growing up knowing that your parents are not in your corner, you have no idea how hard that is to overcome. Usually, it requires years of therapy, which, among other things, costs money (around here: $100-$200/session) that WT doesn’t have. When you grow up with this stuff, it gets incorporated into your neurons, your bone marrow.
Second, things _have_ changed for the worse since I went to college (in the 1970’s.) I have two kids of college age, and I can see it. College costs have increased faster than inflation every year, in part because the folks who run them have lost sight of any goal beyond making their colleges richer. (Penn State is an egregious example, but my own alma mater, an Ivy, is the same.) A college degree has become a prerequisite for more and more jobs, even those for which it makes no sense. Getting into a college — any college — has become harder, more complicated, and harder to understand. Cost of living is rising faster than salaries. Jobs are getting scarcer and scarcer, paying less, and being eliminated more frequently.
The commenter who talked about getting into a trade: that’s not so easy, either, from what I hear. You usually need to go to (and pay for) a trade school, and then you need to get into the union. The trade unions (for obvious reasons) don’t want to let too many people in. If you’re not in the union, you have to compete with all the other underemployed tradesmen for the jobs that are too little to attract union workers, and just hope you don’t get stiffed once you do the job.
It’s hard not to see some kind of deliberate policy in all this: if you keep the proles (the 99%) so busy with the daily effort of just staying alive, they won’t have the time or energy to plot revolution.
I absolutely adore your column Sugar, and there is plenty of beautifully written advice in this response, but I agree with many other commenters who believe you didn’t properly address the heart of WT’s letter–namely her parents being emotionally unavailable, and the fact that the current economic climate is far more complex than the one you navigated when you were in college and grad school.
There is a reason why the Occupy movement is stocked with rightfully furious college students. There is a reason why student loans are a major topic of discussion right now; see the Times cover story for an example. Also, the vast majority of us (20-somethings) have been/are gravely uniformed and/or misinformed about financial matters, particularly re: student loans. Our parents have no frame of reference because our financial landscape is entirely different now, financial aid officers are little to no help, and of course loan officers are predatory rather than helpful, so the distinct feeling of having been “duped” is shared by millions of young people (myself included; I was literally kicked out of undergrad in the midst of my junior year FOR FINANCIAL REASONS and haven’t been able to return yet). As I said, I love your column, and I know you’re a socialist at heart, so I was hoping for a more socialist response. I think you missed an opportunity here.
WT–after your parents remove themselves as co-signers, if I were you I would sit down with them and discuss your feelings about their emotional unavailability. Really open up about the way they make you feel. Even if you aren’t satisfied with their response, at least you’ll no longer have a financial tie to them and at least you’ll have said your piece and unburdened your heart. Good luck my dear.
Also–thanks a lot for posting that petition link Moshe. I’m off to sign it and pass it on. Here’s hoping many others do as well.
Some people upthread have suggested or implied or come right out and said that college education is — and should be considered — “the province of the elite”, that those staggering beneath heavy loads of debt made the choice to shoulder those loads, motivated by their entitlement or by their distaste for good honest blue-collar labor. I want to ask those who feel that way whether they’ve been on the job market recently.
I went to college in the first place because I tried for over a year to find work with no success, because I was told there were no jobs to be had if you didn’t have a BA at least, and I found that to be true. You can’t get a job as a secretary without a BA, these days. Service employers would rather hire teenagers and immigrants because they’re easier to terrorize and exploit. Temp agencies allow companies to farm out their jobs to underpaid workers who are given no benefits — and there still aren’t enough jobs to go around through the temp agencies. I moved across the country before finally getting a job at a grocery store, after applying to more grocery stores and convenience stores and banks and restaurants and offices than I can count or remember. And I kept working there while I went to college, even though the heavy lifting was damaging my spine, until they cut my hours to nothing. And what I didn’t realize is that there would be no jobs for people with BAs, by the time I got out of college. That I’d be exactly where I’d started, but four years older and deep deep in debt.
And I’m lucky! I’m so very lucky, because I went to school as an older student and qualified as an “independent” under aid regulations, meaning I qualified for less-extortionary types of loans, and additional financial aid. Students a few months younger than me, equally independent, also paying their own way, were forced to count their parents’ incomes along with their own in determining how much financial assistance they could receive, and what kind. (That’s what “co-signing means, incidentally — not that WT’s parents paid a dime, but that she was forced to pretend that they could, and that they might, and take on loans reflecting their perceived ability to contribute assistance.) Kids who’d been on their own since eighteen, or before, had to try to track their parents down and figure out how much money they had and pay as though that money were supporting them — and will be paying those loans til they die. Paying as much, or more, as they’d pay for a car. Or rent. Both, in some cases. And we’ve all had to do this, had to mortgage our futures, indenture ourselves, just to get jobs. Some of us wanted to live the Life of the Mind, sure — and we should have known our places, evidently, known that such lofty pursuits were above our lowly stations. But some of us just wanted jobs, and we were told, or discovered on our own, that a diploma was the only chance. We didn’t realize just how small the chance would be. And now I’m a college graduate with veterinary and academic lab work experience and I can’t get a minimum-wage job cleaning animal cages.
Do you realize how entitled you sound, as you call us entitled? How silly, how cruel it is to tell us to find blue collar work? Thanks for the advice, dear Marie Antoinettes, but I don’t live near any factories. I can’t afford a car to drive to wherever the factories may be. Are there still factories, where you are? The factories here have all closed down. Hell, people with extensive manufacturing experience are particularly hurting in this recession, and if there are manufacturing jobs, even at the drastically lowered wages they pay now, they’re going to go to the people with experience. There simply aren’t enough jobs to go around. We can pull and pull and pull at our bootstraps until they rip off in our fists, but even if we rise we’re only floating in thin air. There’s nothing for us to stand on, and unless something changes radically, there never will be.
And Sugar, it’s great that you are living a life you love. But even with your rough start, you had it a little easier than many people do nowadays. How many people get to live a life they love? Not many. How many get to live the writing life? Even fewer. Did you get there on your own, or did you get their on your own and with a little luck? Is it fair to be so harsh with someone feeling hopeless? Are you so insecure that you need to defend your good fortune by labeling it all (even the chance parts) your own work? Because that’s what it is to “adhere to an entirely pull-oneself-up-by-one’s-bootstraps creed”. Is it hard, at this distance, to realize that your relationship to WT is — perverse as it sounds — closer to younger-you’s relationship to Kate? Such is the burden new graduates bear, the relative privilege possessed by those who went to school under the less-predatory system. I’m not even kidding.
Self-pity may be a dead-end road, but so is the one we’re treading. A lot of us don’t see a way out. Is that supposed to feel empowering, that we’re on this road alone? A lot of us really can’t afford to go to graduate school — and it’s not a question of “whether you let” the debt stop you, after a certain point. A lot of us can’t afford “ridiculously expensive cowboy boots” — hell, I haven’t been to a dentist in years, let alone bought new shoes.
You ask, “What is a student loan identity?” That’s what it is: a long long tunnel with no light at its end, no cheer along the way, and rats snaking past your ankles, biting with sharp teeth when you stop kicking for an instant. And knowing that you can’t kick forever.
Visit wounded soldiers, feed the homeless, visit a nursing home, mentor a student, help someone learn to read, adopt a shelter pet(because of foreclosures the shelters have dogs/cats coming in by the millions), open doors for others, smile, wave, eat some chocolate, be happy that in this country you don’t have to wear a burka, that you can say anything you want except yell “fire”, give 3 compliments a day, sit outside without worrying about bombs, sing with the radio/ipod etc, make brownies. GIVE THANKS!!!!!You have an education. Everybody I know is in debt.
We bought the song and dance about how easy credit was to get….now we know the cards that used to fill our wallets were in there robbing us blind. Now, maybe we know better. It’s only money and you will eventually get your loans paid. Are you healthy? Do you have enough to eat? Is there a roof over your head? Do you have people who love you. Look at how rich you are.
@haldane – fuck. i love your comment/reply. it’s more right on than sugar’s reply, for once. she, i, several of us, did go to school when it wasn’t such a joke, when it was a “less predatory” system, as you put it. and i graduated in 2005! i fear for my children. maybe that’s why we keep saying those hollow words to those of you going through it now: keep trying, it’s not the end, buck up, all that. it’s fear. fear that what we saved for, dreamed of for our children, looked forward to as they grew into young adults, just isn’t there anymore. that it’s all gone to shit. i’m so sorry for all of you new grads and anyone looking for work who is discouraged beyond words. i’m so sorry.
who ARE discouraged beyond words. grammar typo. my bad.
I think Wearing Thin is definitely coming from an entitled, privileged place in many respects. And I also get that 20-something angst at the parents because I went through it too.
My parents grew up in the Depression, then had three kids in the first 4 years of marriage–they were dirt poor. When I came along, many years later, they had solid jobs and a solid middle to upper-middle class life. But, they never considered that one of their kids would want to go to college…hell, two of the first three didn’t even graduate high school.
When the time came around, I was told that it was going to be on my shoulders–and on my shoulders it rested, stacks of student loans (and because I was under 24 and lived with my parents, their income was the determining factor for how much money I got…grants were completely out of the question), and working three part-time jobs while going to school full-time. I graduated by the skin of my teeth, but I did it. And I spent those four years and a couple more resenting the hell out of my parents.
But, something changed as I matured and looked around at my siblings’ lives and the lives of my friends who didn’t have to foot their own bill…they were all drowning in their lives–financially, emotionally, professionally, etc. They didn’t have to learn the skills I did–ones like Aldi has ramen noodles and canned soup for dirt cheap or if wanna drink booze you better get used to Keystone and Boone’s Farm because that’s all you’ll be able to afford.
I got lucky and found jobs right away (I so miss the 90s and their wide-open employment opps), got my own place, bought my own car (with a loan of course), and realized something that I never even considered in the previous 25 years of my life–I’m damn good at this. I didn’t do it alone, but I didn’t get by easy either and I made the most of it. Once I realized that, the resentment and anger towards my parents dissolved and I could see them for who they were, not the skewed view that I had of them. And like Wearing Thin, my parents were unbelievably critical, emotionallly-unavailable, and dare I say, even a little abusive (verbally/mentally). But they grew out of that and so did I.
So, I got something that my siblings and my “overly privileged” friends didn’t get. It wasn’t the jobs or the swift move up the career ladder or even the chance to live in the city I’d wanted to since my first visit to it. In the end, it was a solid, usually nurturing, enjoyable relationship with my parents…one I still share with them 20 some years later.
Wearing Thin–push through that resentment, push through the money woes (because when it comes to debt, if you’re going to have it, financial aid is the best kind to have), realize that your parents are a product of how they were raised and strike out on your own to create the person YOU want to be…they will either fall in line with it or shy away…and that’s out of your control. Chances are, it’ll be the former because they’ll see that in the end, it’s not really about the money.
It just takes some people a lot longer to realize that than it does others.
“Food, education, housing, and health are human rights. This country, if it chose to do so, could feed, house, educate, and care for every citizen.”
No they are not. You do not have the right to demand anything that someone else must give you. If I own an apple orchard, guess what. I don’t owe you or anyone else apples. I can eat them all day and let you starve.
I probably wouldn’t. But I can. Because you do not have the moral or legal right to demand I give you anything at all.
The great irony is that while “deal with the shitty hand you’ve been dealt as best you can, suck it up and don’t complain” may often be the best approach on the individual level, on the societal level, it is EXACTLY what the 1% want us to do to keep us from fighting back. As the system crumbles around us, as the income gap grows between the haves and the have-nots, as more and more funding is pulled from state universities to give tax breaks to the ultra-rich… we hardworking, proud, “independent” types double down on our work hours, cut back on our luxuries, forgo seeing the doctor when we’re sick, forgo seeing the dentist or eating decent food. And all of this drains our spirits and our bodies and keeps us too exhausted to be politically active.
The Koch brothers and their bought-and-paid-for Congressional cronies love the humble working poor, who don’t delude themselves they are somehow “entitled” to a decent quality of life in this, the richest country on earth. They love that we take such pride in our ability to subsist on ramen noodles and constantly find the “Zen” of abusive working conditions because labor rights are also being stripped away. Like Boxer in “Animal Farm,” our response to re-writing of the social contract is “I will work harder.”
No, don’t let go of your anger, Wearing Thin. Your anger is totally merited. But don’t direct it at your parents, direct it at the right-wing privatizing zealots who are even now buying off more elections to ensure that America is the only rich country in the world whose youth have to mortgage their futures for a college education.
Simply – you are the 99%.
Bellson, that’s the saddest thing I’ve seen or heard all day. It’s also wrong. Here is a link to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/. Please note Article 25. Please note also Article 17. The UN, of which the US is a member (I’m assuming you’re American), rejects your assertion and the false equivalency behind it: a decent standard of living is a human right, and ensuring all have enough to eat doesn’t necessarily depend upon depriving others of their property unfairly.
Shame it’s not a binding document. Shame we (and so many other countries) don’t live up to it. But at least we’re not such sorry-assed creatures as to reject the principle outright, Bellson. You may argue that no one has the right to “demand”, but I would assert that you have the moral obligation to give, if you want to be worthy of the name “human being”. Saying you “probably” wouldn’t let someone starve — while eating in front of them and watching, no less! — is fucking appalling.
And Michelle, with respect, I think the first sentence of your fifth paragraph explains why ramen and Boone’s Farm aren’t enough to solve the problems of people up to their ears in student loan debt. Remember how hard you had to scramble, even with your skills and talents. Then remember the person upthread who pointed out how much college costs have soared over the past few decades. Then try to imagine how much harder your loans would have been to deal with if they’d been as large as ours are. Then try to work out how you’d deal with even larger loans if you hadn’t gotten a job right away, if there were no jobs to get.
“You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding.”
The problem with this analogy is that often, in cards, the most prudent thing to do is fold.
Haldane,
I’m genuinely interested in discussing this – I promise I’m not trying to be an asshole. But first of all, you said yourself it isn’t binding. So there’s that. But more importantly, please tell me where the moral authority comes for you to demand something of me? Isn’t that slavery? I’m genuinely curious – I do not understand socialists; I find them disgusting, actually, but I am genuinely, honestly curious about understanding the point of view of someone who says that I must work not only for myself but for strangers. Please explain.
What about children, Bellson? Do we as a society have the right to let a sick child die if his mother can’t pay for medical
attention? And if not, who should pay for that?
Well, I’ll take a shot –
Those of us who are not radical libertarians do not see property rights as the most sacred fundament of society. They are useful TOOLS to accomplish worthy ends, but private property is not something to be worshipped in and of itself. It pains us more to see someone starve than to see someone taxed. Empathy and compassion are core values for us.
If you believe that social pressure to share is “slavery,” then you must believe that all hunter-gatherer societies consist of nothing but slaves. Until agriculture became widespread (i.e. for the vast majority of human history) people shared what they gathered and hunted with the entire group. It would have been unthinkable not to do so – the group would not have survived otherwise – and most such societies were quite egalitarian. Egalitarian relationships, in my book, are the opposite of master/slave relationships.
Elissa,
It is interesting to me that you didn’t mention a father in your scenario. But to answer your question, we take care of those people. In the past, it was via churches and private charities. Now we do have medical care for the very poor, which we all pay for via our taxes.
Secondly you said “have the right”… the answer is yes. It is awful, but who else, besides the parents, is responsible for the child? I should not be obligated to pay for anything that someone else can’t afford, whether it is children or health care or Rolls Royces or anything else.
That said, we live in a compassionate society in which most people recognize the value of a healthy child, and are happy to assist the child to maturity.
(And of course, many such societies persist today – I don’t mean to speak only in the past tense!)
You may also be interested in reading the book “Unhealthy Societies” by Richard Wilkinson. He is a doctor and public health expert who looks at data from many different countries and finds that, once basic sanitation and nutrition thresholds have been passed, it is the level of income inequality in a society that has the closest correlation to poor health, NOT the level of absolute income. Even controlling for other correlated factors (smoking, obesity, etc.) the constant stress of being low man on the totem pole for some, and fighting to maintain the alpha position for others, hurts people’s bodies as well as their hearts.
Erica,
You said: “Empathy and compassion are core values for us.”
Do you not see how that can be true for a libertarian or a conservative too? Or do you reserve that for a socialist mindset?
You said:
“If you believe that social pressure to share is “slavery,†then you must believe that all hunter-gatherer societies consist of nothing but slaves.”
Stop right there. You’re muddying the waters with these fuzzy thoughts. I said nothing about societal pressure. I said (in my example) I HAVE TO WORK FOR YOU TO HAVE MY APPLES. Is that slavery? I am being very deliberate about it because I see it as a very deliberate choice. If you answer, “Yes, you must work and share” then you must agree that the person doing the work is a slave. There is no other word for that. If you do not believe it is slavery to work for the benefit of others with no benefit to yourself, then you can discuss “societal pressure” and whatnot as a way to minimize the contribution of the one who is providing the good (in this example, apples.)
Until agriculture became widespread (i.e. for the vast majority of human history) people shared what they gathered and hunted with the entire group.
Perhaps, but they did not share with the entire country, and those who did not work were aged, very young, or ill. Nowadays, we have people who simply choose not to work.
It would have been unthinkable not to do so – the group would not have survived otherwise – and most such societies were quite egalitarian.
Care to expand on that? Of course they would have survived – the strong would have. Isn’t that what liberals love to defend, Darwin’s theory of evolution?
Egalitarian relationships, in my book, are the opposite of master/slave relationships.
But you’re simply wrong because someone is working to make sure that everyone is “equal”. I suppose the slaves in the south should have been grateful – we had a wonderful program for them, giving them free shelter and food, and they must have gotten such a great deal of satisfaction from working all the time to serve their white masters, right?
By your logic, Bellson, we have no obligation then to intervene on behalf of an abused child, since that child is not our responsibility. What moral authority are you invoking for this system of yours? You don’t have to believe in God (I don’t) to recognize that there’s nothing morally okay about a scenario like that.
I have grave concerns about the government’s willingness to intercede on the behalf of anyone who appears to need it. The government is there to protect us from each other (like the abuse child you cite) and other nations who attack us. That’s it. The abuser is violating the child’s property rights (the right to himself, his body). Therefore, the attacker should be made to stop and punished. It is appropriate for the state to intervene in this scenario.
Though there are some circumstances in which professionals must report child abuse (doctors and teachers come to mind), there is no law that says you, a private citizen, must report it. You should, if you’re a good person, but you probably won’t go to prison for not reporting it (see the Penn State scandal).
You keep using children in your examples. For children, and indeed all kinds of genuinely helpless people such as the severely handicapped, the elderly, the mentally insane, exceptions are made all the time to the rule that you must provide for yourself. But those are exceptions. And there should not be as many helpless people as there are.
Wearing Thin is so young. She has her whole life ahead of her and she’s ruining it by thinking of herself as one of these victim groups. I wish more people would grasp their power and quit defining themselves as one who needs care, instead of who has the ability and willingness to provide.
Bellson, Wearing Thin is hardly ruining her life. She’s an apparently driven young woman who is paying her own way and wishes to go even further. She’s seeking some kind of emotional support in a moment of overwhelming anxiety, because her parents are reneging on the terms under which she contracted for a loan. As a result, she will be left with higher monthly payments than she agreed to, and she will probably be unable to go to graduate school (since she won’t be able to defer payments while doing so). I don’t know why her attempt to come to terms with this considerable setback should be viewed with such contempt.
As has been exhaustively belabored above, a student loan in Sugar’s day was high enough to be decades in the paying off. It is exponentially more burdensome now, in a way which has far outstripped inflation.
If a young person of modest means is smart and driven and diligent and high-performing and, say, burning to become a doctor, it does not benefit us as a society to make it staggeringly prohibitive for him or her to become a doctor. It does not benefit us as a society to tell him or her to go climb telephone poles instead. You’re clearly a smart person yourself, so surely you can understand this.
THANK. YOU. I do not have parents that can pay my bills. I graduated college in three years to avoid extra debt. I’m living and working in L.A. of my own accord whilst my friends dick around and get drunk. And yet, I am certainly not jealous. I am so, so, so, so unbelievably proud of the person my parents took excruciating measures to turn me in to. I am so proud to be exactly who I am. I am so blessed beyond the meaning of the word to have grown up with them as my parents, and to have been raised to have the gumption to pursue my dreams regardless of the fact that I don’t have medical insurance, I feel guilty for paying $38 for groceries, and I have toe work a day job. I’m also blessed beyond the meaning of the the meaning of the word to be friends with those people who have the great fortune to be able to dick around and get drunk every night simply because they can. There friendships mean more to me than the fact that they go shopping at Nordstrom, whilst I go shopping at Goodwill. And they feel the same about me. And I don’t waste my time being jealous, I fulfill my time working hard, and being proud and thankful to do so.
…A frightening number of people in the world are unaware of the actual living reality of the human beings around them. It is the complete absence of empathy in action. They believe themselves to be real, of course, yet they merely lack the imagination to see that other persons are also real in the same way and on the same terms. Thus, even though they go through the obligatory social forms and personal relationships, all other people are “objects” rather than people. If all other people are objects, then there can be no psychic trauma involved in treating them as objects. John D. McDonald (creator of Travis McGee).
I read a few of the comments and did not see any mention of the U.S. government’s role in creating a huge chunk of this problem. The politicians wanted to feel good about all the nice stuff they were doing like guarantees for school loans not realizing that with uncle sugar providing more money the colleges would be able to increase tuition and everything and siphon off this extra money. This is not to give wearing thin an out but to point out that government rarely if ever does anything well. Wearing thin would still have had a loan but if tuition etc. had not gone sky high it would not be quite so big. I worked my way through post graduate when I came to study in this country in the sixties. That is no longer possible because of the exorbitant increase in cost. Higher ed needs to be put on a diet.
Your point about benefiting from the unpleasant jobs is spot on. My favorite in retelling is the dog food factory. I know what meat byproducts are. I used the money from those 2 summers to pay for college the following years. If nothing else, I recognize how blest I am today with my geology job.
I read the letter, response and comments with great interest, in particular Wearing Thin’s reply.
I think that many of the commenters made a great point: that a large part of the issue is not the money, but the lack of emotional relationship with the parents. But, here too, I think that Sugar’s overall theme bears repeating: “You have no right to the cards you think you should have, you have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’ve got.”
Wearing Thin, have you tried looking at this from your parent’s point of view? I don’t mean just intellectually, I mean really “feeling their pain.”
Co-signing a significant loan – being on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars – it does not just stress you. It stresses them, too, don’t you think?
I’m sorry to say this, but you do have a “sense of entitlement,” Wearing Thin. Why do your parents “owe you” the cosigning? Why haven’t you immediately taken them off of that loan? Because you feel you are entitled to a certain lifestyle? What about your parent’s lifestyle’s? Why are they perpetually responsible for you, as if you were a child, well into your 20’s?
You can vote. You can drink. You can drive a car. Why exactly is it not up to you, and only you, to provide for yourself? To justify the goods and labor that you consume (created through the efforts of other people) by ensuring that you’ve produced enough goods and labors (that other’s value) to validate the exchange?
It’s time to grow up, Wearing Thin. No, seriously. Grow. Up. This perpetual adolescence thing is getting old – not just yours, but societies. That’s what “Occupy Wall Street” really is, too: oh why, oh why can’t we be adolescents forever!?!? Why can’t we have most of the freedoms but none of the responsibilities or burdens of hard work!
Why can’t we just have our “dream jobs” and “follow our bliss?” Why do we have to do things that other people value… in exchange for money?! Why do we have to pay back the tens of thousands of dollars that it cost to have teachers teach us for years, to pay for our housing and food and “experiences” during college?
Guess what, Wearing Thin. You parents aren’t perfect. They are flawed humans who struggle to get by, every day. Just like you. And if you were a better person, you’d have some charity for them, instead of wallowing in self-indulgent “mommy doesn’t love me enough” blather. They provided for you. A lot. Many people have less. Now they have asked something reasonable from you. And you have not complied, now, have you? You haven’t done the one significant thing that they’ve asked from you. And yet you have the gaul to complain about them?
Grow. Up.
It’s not always about you.
A very good discussion here. But regardless of how you feel about the responsibility of a society to its members, remember this…nothing is free. NOTHING. Just because you get something at no cost to you, doesn’t mean it didn’t cost anything.
If we all agreed today that our country should provide housing, food, education and health care to every citizen that would be grand. But tell me just how is it going to be paid for? The government does not make money (they sometimes print it, but they never earn it). The government takes money from people and redistributes it. Eventually, there are more people taking than contributing. What happens then?
Sugar, I thought you gave a very good response.
I could not believe the whining that filled some of the comments. Oh, c’mon, folks. Nobody told you that $25,000 or $50,000 or more in loans would be fun and easy to pay back. Uh, weren’t you supposed to be smart enough to go to college? Didn’t you successfully pass 8th grade arithmetic? If you weren’t smart enough to handle 8th grade math, then you did not belong in college in the first place.
If you do not want to be burdened by student loans, then don’t borrow the money! Do your first two years in a community college. Then transfer to a public college for your junior and senior years. And learn how to do something valuable enough that somebody will pay you money to do it. If you have spent four years and haven’t managed to learn anything of any practical value, whose fault is that? And don’t tell me how a few million people were just as foolish as you. The question is what did you learn in exchange for those many thousands of dollars. If you want to major in something that enriches your soul but does not provide you with any knowledge that would prompt anyone to want to hire you, that is fine with me as long as either you came from a family wealthy enough to pay for your “education” without pain or you promise never to whine about your student loan debt.
Aunt Judie,
Never in our history have there been more people taking than contributing. The suggestion that we will ever reach that state is ludicrous. We’ll devolve into a failed state well before then. But the most successful states in the world these days–the ones with the lowest mortality rates, with the longest average life spans, with the greatest social mobility and the highest measures of happiness–are all countries with a strong social safety net. And they’re mostly in western Europe. And they all guarantee the things you list in your second paragraph–housing, food, education and health care. They manage to pay for it. We simply refuse to.
I was dismayed to see that when Wearing Thin responded in the comments section, she proudly announced that she had joined the Occupy movement. This strikes me as a lesson not learned, a wish to see the government step in where she thinks her parents failed her, and an attempt to delay the inevitable succession of crummy jobs that might eventually get her someplace she wants to be.
She “cried out in joy” when an Occupy movement broke out in her city. She’s “proud” to be a part of it. “Finally I have a voice” she proclaims, as if not having parents who will pay for graduate school puts her among the “voiceless.”
Sure, the Occupy movement may be a blast, but it’s not going to get Wearing Thin a job. No matter how it may look from inside the Occupy park in her hometown, raging at the unfairness of the world is only going to get her further entrenched in her own emotions. It certainly won’t get her a better job or lead her to her dream job. Her parents, the government, even her fellow Occupiers…in the end, they’ll all look out for themselves first, not her. She’s an adult, she’s on her own, and the world really is as rough as it feels right now. Rougher, even. She ought to seek out opportunities, not other people in despair. Then, I believe, things will get much better.
@Jim, you say “Nobody told you that $25,000 or $50,000 or more in loans would be fun and easy to pay back.”
Well, actually, yes, EVERY SINGLE TRUSTED ADULT AUTHORITY FIGURE IN MY LIFE when I was 17 years old told me that student loans were “good debt” and I shouldn’t worry too much about them. That’s where the sense of betrayal comes from in my generation.
So many right-wingers like to live in fantasy land where humans are all Homo Economicus, making our rational, anomic, self-interested decisions. But actually, we live in society and are profoundly influenced by culture.
Thank you WT and Sugar and all the others who have posted.
There is certainly something wrong with the system, as many OWS supporters expressed. But it isn’t just the system. People who go into tremendous debt going to school without spending five minutes figuring out what a graduate gets paid in a related job, or an adjunct professor who will be paying bills until 60 (literally!) after attending graduate school, seem so over-educated that they lack common sense. We can’t all be museum curators and astronauts! That some are using these examples as reasons to change our entire system of paying back what you’ve borrowed are misguided.
Bottom line, you are responsible for you. Your P poor planning does not constitute an emergency on my part. However, compassion is called for. Give people the chance to help you by taking all the $200,000 of education you can muster, and humble, with hat in hand, explain to someone who is offering a job why you think you can do it better than most because you appreciate the chance to prove yourself. That will go a lot further than occupying any public park.
My thoughts and prayers are with you all…
What you didn’t say about what you learned from your conveyor-belt job or the others (but was implicit) is that you learned exactly what those green pieces of paper and the numbers on your bank account and loan statements really represented–a lot of sacrifice and hard, unenjoyable work.
My parents paid for my college but no frills. I was perfectly satisfied with this, but it was only many years later in a job in my decently-paying field that I began to realize what it had really cost them. All I’ll say here is I regret how much I took for granted.
I see some blame the government for the loans they’re now burdened with. But NO ONE has blamed the colleges whose tuitions have risen to match the amount of loans available, which was much faster than the average cost of living.
“I struggle with student loans often defining me.”
What is it with this lately?
Yes, the decision to take on crippling, non-dischargeable debt in exchange for an education that probably isn’t actually worth much is probably one of the defining decisions in your life. It is what it is, and it sucks, but that doesn’t mean you’re entitled to someone else’s bottom line to make it go away.
I took out loans to get an education in something I was highly motivated to do; I can blame the school for giving me not much more than a pile of post-modernist BS, I can blame the government for regulating the available jobs out of existence, but the bill is no one’s fault but my own.
Didja notice the ‘instalanche’?
I sent this column to Instapundit – the ‘blogfather’ – Glen Reynolds. He linked you and quoted you at length.
It should drive up your web traffic considerably.
I’m so glad to see folks posting about the issue of educational institutions raising tuitions, and for Brian straight-shooting about how the U.S. really stacks up against other “first world” nations. I am so incredibly grateful for OWS giving us frame to hang things on — even if I disagree completely with the folks who refer to them as privileged whiners.
Part of the problem with the system is the lie that if you are having trouble making ends meet, if you are having trouble getting out of debt, it is primarily the fault of your personal choices, and if you had made all the Right Choices, you’d be fine. This assumes that there is No Relationship between the broken-ness of the system, its tendency to reward those who already have the most, and tendency to punish those who are “high risk” by making them pay more for things they need but can barely afford and the “failure” individuals experience.
If you have to make all the Right Choices to be fine, the system is broken. The rich have wiggle room like you wouldn’t believe. To be privileged is to have wiggle room to screw up repeatedly and not lose everything every time.
And some of the conversation makes me think of Elizabeth Warren. There is no such thing as a factory, an orchard, a magazine, a business, that exists solely by the labor and effort of one person who then has no obligation or economic motivation to share with anyone else, or to repay the collaboration of effort that makes your tractor, keeps up your roads, connects your phone, makes sure your water isn’t polluted, etc.
Our economic system is not like the solar system. We made it and we can change it. It is a constructed thing, it is not that old, and it certainly could stand some revision.
I am thinking that we could not have had this conversation without the tension created by the way Sugar answered this letter. What a weird world.
Brian Spears,
Take a look at the tax rates in those countries you refer to. They can’t possibly provide all those services just by taxing “the rich”, so they must be taxing the majority of their population at pretty high rates. What level of taxation do you think working Americans will tolerate? You think there is civil unrest now? Wait until they try to raise income taxes to Sweden-like levels.
And I’m not saying the system isn’t in need of some serious adjustment. There is way too much waste and corruption in government. The politically-connected benefit from government money, which they then kick back to the politicians in the form of campaign contributions. We are in wars and conflicts all around the world where we have no business being. My original point was that nothing is free. We can change our economic system (as Lara says above) but this will always be true.
They are taxing at fairly high rates, Judie, but they’re hitting the wealthy harder as well. And the people in those nations have decided that they valued a government which worked well for them and provided common goods. We’ve gotten away from the notion of the commonweal, thanks in large part to propaganda from people who argue that government can’t do anything well in spite of all the evidence that it does, when people who actually want it to work are in charge of it. I have no doubt that middle and working class people would scream if we taxed them at Sweden’s rates but didn’t provide social benefits or didn’t tax the wealthy, but that’s what debates over policy and politics are for–to argue those things out and try to win people over to your side.
Actually, if the rich are making most of the money, then yes, simply raising taxes on the folks at the very top (1%, 2%, whatever) will make a difference. Assuming they are prevented from getting all that money back in predatory financial practices.
Also, it isn’t just about taxation. There are several interlocking factors related to social safety nets and people setting up their nation / government to make sure the basic needs of all the people of the nation are met.
I think healthcare is great object lesson on the limits of “the market.” My dad the capitalist would say the biggest difference between the u.s. and western europe is health care. He thinks the market is great. But, he says, it can’t “run” something well whose goal is not profit. Low infant mortality, fewer chronic conditions in adults, better over health throughout a population is not profitable to the health care system. But it is profitable to the economic wellbeing of your nation as a whole. I wish we could see that.
Just in this one example, if all the hours spent on going to the doctor, sorting through hundreds of bills, and just being sick were instead spent on improving the education system, inventing cooler and better renewable energy, our “bottom line” would improve. If student loans costs and tuition stayed exactly the same except that there was universal health care, that burden would ease some as well.
I don’t think healthcare is the only issue. I just think it is a good example of reframing arguments about markets and taxes, etc.
Just as an aside, why is it logical to charge people who make less more to borrow money? Morality and money don’t mix that well either.
I agree with Bellson. Saying food, education, housing, and health are human rights is inane. They are goods and services that cost money and effort to produce. As such, they belong to the people who make the effort and spend the money to produce them. Requiring someone to give away the product of his labor because it’s someone else’s “right” to have it for free is nothing more than slavery. You can gussy it up all you want, but it’s slavery when you force someone to work and take away what they produced without compensation.
Human rights don’t cost money. They are inherent. Goods cost money because they have to be created by someone. A real, honest-to-God, live person. That’s a fundamental distinction.
Now, whether we choose to help people, and under what circumstances, is a question of individual values and societal policy. We can choose to do many things and be supportive in many ways. But it’s a conscious decision because it’s a choice we make (and a choice that can be altered as circumstances change). But no matter how generous we are as individuals or as a society, nothing we can ever do will make a good that has to be created by human labor a “human right”. Because down that road is only slavery.
So many comments saying those concerned about educational debt need to “grow up.” I wonder if those commenters really believe that citizens of Australia, Canada, Japan, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Germany, South Africa, the UK, Switzerland, Belgium, Israel, Poland – in fact just about every other industrialized country on the planet – are perpetual adolescents because they live in societies where education is considered a public benefit, not a private investment. Or if Americans had to take on debt to attend high school, not just college, would that make us even more mature?
Erica, you are so right on with that.
I wonder about this possibility too: Wearing Thin dreams of entering a certain profession which entails a graduate degree. It is likely then that she incurred her HUGE undergraduate debt for the purpose of achieving that specific end (since college is of course a prerequisite for grad school). Had she known that her parents would renege on their role in her loan, leaving her unable to go to grad school (since she won’t be allowed to defer repayment while doing so), then she may well not have chosen to incur that huge debt in the first place. To sign on for that debt as a means to a specific goal, and then to have that ultimate goal moved hopelessly out of reach: it’s the absolute worst of both worlds.
Aunt Judie, It may offer some insight to give you one data point from a western european country with a strong safety net. I am an American living in France, and I file both US and French taxes, and the same (middle range) income is reported in both countries. Comparing all income and social taxes, I pay just slightly less total in France than in the US. Differences to note are that France also provides health insurance (that I use now, not when I retire), and the French sales tax can be as much as 19.6%. I’m also a resident of Texas which has no state income tax, so others in my situation would also be paying additional state taxes in the US.
Sugar’s advice and comments were spot on, but so were all the various commentators above, each in their own special way.
I was surprised that very few pointed out that student debt is the very worst kind of debt possible: even if you end up having to declare bankruptcy, the student debt stays with you. So even if it looks counter-intuitive, pay down the student debt FIRST.
The advice about how to get the value of a college education (i.e. the knowledge imparted in the classrooms) through books and the Internet was also spot-on. Before anyone decides to go on for a post-graduate degree, they should go down to their public library and check out the book, The Richest Man in Babylon by George Clason. This book explains that it’s not about the amount of money you earn, it’s about the percentages of how you distribute the money you earn. The worst thing about the college loan payments mentioned by most people above is that they’re not related in any way to the amount of money coming in to the debtor’s household. If someone is paying $600 per month in student loan payments (assuming no other debt), then they need to have $3,000 per month coming in, otherwise they’re going to find themselves sinking further and further into debt. You need to pay no more than 20% on past debts, save 10% towards making yourself rich (building up investment income, which will eventually earn you more money than what you can put into your investment vehicle yourself), and live on the rest. That’s the theory, but the predatory lenders who quote all these great statistics at kids entering college, making it sound as if all they need to do is get a degree to be able to make all kinds of money, afford the house of their dreams, etc., don’t bother educating them about this. These “kindly” lenders have left both these kids AND their parents feeling as if they’re out on a skinny limb with someone sawing away at it. If “Wearing Thin” needs to pull herself up by her bootstraps, so do her parents, because if she ends up sinking into a pit of depression, THEY’RE the ones who’ll be stuck for the loans. They need to have a serious sit-down and discuss how they can free THEIR FAMILY from this overwhelming burden before it gets worse. I’m sure that when they all first signed those loan papers they didn’t have a clue into just what kind of stress and indentured servitude they were putting themselves.
The answers may just be more manageable than they think.
I still haven’t seen any way that the Occupy Wall Street crowd will be able to achieve their “Utopian” (?) dreams.
One of my sons is in tech school, having chosen his program by indexing aptitude test scores against job statistics. My other son enlisted in the Marines to get the feds to pay for his college, and now is attending community college. Both sons are now living with me. Neither has taken a loan, and I hope neither has to. Too many of my younger co-workers are near-suicidal because their student loan payments are half again the size of my mortgage, meaning they need side jobs to scrape by. Spending your college years living with six people in a one-toilet house sucks, especially when your friends are in student apartments where they can party, but graduating with such debt you have to work two jobs when your kids are small sucks even more.
I’m going to take the opposite tack of everyone here and say that you should NOT take your parents off the loan, at least not right away. They made that decision just as you did and with more knowledge and awareness of the consequences. You say they don’t meet any of your emotional needs, you need to make sure they don’t destroy you financially as well.
What you need to do is recognize that there are two sides to this financial equation – their future and yours. You need to find out what their future would be with and without their names on the loan. Then do the same for yourself. If the numbers end up lopsided (and my guess is that they will be hugely in your parent’s favor), ask how you will be compensated for the huge financial loss they are asking you to take. Just get these numbers on the table. Right now, it looks like you are just being mean. Find out what it is that they are really asking of you. Would they be saving $5,000 on a loan now, only to leave you saddled with $50,000 more in lifetime debt? Those are the sorts of numbers I’ve heard about in situations like this.
For everyone saying that Waiting should just buy her freedom at any cost, I’m saying that her parents need to know exactly what that cost is before demanding it. Lifetime payments. Foregone graduate school. Forgone earnings from having a graduate degree. And their friends should know. Your parents got a large amount of social capital by having a daughter go to a good school. Everyone keeping quiet about what happens later is a large part of the reason we are in this mess. Everyone pretending that their salaries cover the cost of the lifestyle involved in being the sort of person who has a particular job.
And Sugar, run the numbers on your life if you were born 20 years later. Would the internet let you lie about having a degree? Would your waitressing job pay for today’s rent and today’s student loans? I’m about the same age and I remember older people telling me, but I paid for college with my summer job! They had no interest in noticing that summer jobs paying $10,000 didn’t exist. Please pay closer attention to the cards Waiting has been dealt.
This touched me on such a profound level.
Delighted to see that the Mos are out in force today! (That is, there are two of us!)
I’m 100% with Mo.
~Mo
PS: Shout-outs also to Lara, Haldane, Erica et al – keep fighting the good fight, guys.
Just putting my voice out there in support of Mo, Lara, Erica, Elissa…and anger and disbelief towards Bellson and Aunt Judie. Especially Aunt Judie! Just the handle makes you sound so nice.
Of course it’s a human right to live, you sillies. That includes everything necessary TO live.
While college is not one of those things, my heart goes out to Wearing Thin. I hear a lot of self-hatred in much of the “advice” being hurled at her — especially to “grow up.” Really? Are you so grown up yourself? Are you sure?
It’s just quite a statement to call yourself mature, and drawn a line where someone else is not. Do you know anything else about her life? No. And that is quite a judgment to make based on so little information.
While I hope that you are as mature as you all claim to be, all you “grow-up”pers, (since mature people, like educated people, are good for society), I kind of doubt it honestly. If it needs to be said….etc.
Dear Wearing Thin, even your handle is so well chosen. I get it. Cry and rage because that’s what it makes sense to do right now. But please don’t bottle it up inside and “grow up”, for fear that you will be unleashing similarly cold advice on youngsters a generation from now.
If you’re going to make an argument, Bellson, make one, but don’t come here with that weaksauce “national health care makes doctors into slaves” crap. It’s inane. Doctors in national health care systems get paid for what they do, they’re allowed to quit their positions at any time, and most importantly, they’re allowed to choose (or not) that profession of their own free will.
Sugar, I love you and your column SO MUCH, but I also felt this one missed the mark, and it made me ache a little. Not because I don’t believe in working as hard as you possibly can and in forcing your way through impossible situations–not at all that, because I believe everyone should work as hard as they can–but because like e.r. said, what you personally were able to overcome someone else may not be able to for reasons like physical and mental health, racism, sexual or gender orientation, etc. And telling them, “Well, I could do this, why can’t you?” isn’t just unhelpful, but also a little harmful. As someone who’s struggling with mental health issues, part of what’s so completely exhausting about life right now is that there’s this pressure from the world inching into every area of my life with its whispers: “Why can’t you just get over this? Why can’t you just pull yourself up by your bootstraps like everyone else? Why do you need help? You’re pathetic.” Over and over until these poisonous things become the only thing I can hear and another reason to be angry at myself, to feel like I can’t go on.
When someone’s living in an environment like that, someone else telling them what they’re already thinking–“stop whining, you should be able to do this”–just makes it seem more like they’re messed up and wrong. Maybe WT or people who are in her situation ARE whining, but they could also be crying out for some compassion and help, genuinely. Not tickets to get out of jail free, but people to hold hands with them and make them believe they CAN get through this. You made a lot of references to self-pity in this column, and who knows if that’s what Wearing Thin was actually going through, but sometimes when people are struggling it’s not because they’re feeling sorry for themselves, and it’s not because they’re not trying and working themselves as hard as they can. It’s just because they need help. That doesn’t negate the course of action–still “work as hard as you can”–but I guess I feel like it does change how you should talk to them about it. I know you didn’t intend to hurt anyone at all, and I don’t think you gave the wrong advice to Wearing Thin. But I do think it wasn’t worded in your normal compassionate way. And that hurt a bit. I just wanted to tell you this because I love and respect you so much, and your columns have gotten me through a lot.
Cripes. Reading these comments has opened my eyes to what things are like in the US. I thought people had it bad here in Britain, but this is something else. People’s stories of financial and employment situations that would be considered outrageous in Europe really bother me. If you can’t get a secretarial job without a degree that you’ll be in debt for till you’re 60, it’s time to take action on a large scale. Our government is trying to steer jobs and education towards a US model, but resistance is at least slowing the pace. I’m really sorry for everyone’s difficulties, and I hope ordinary Americans find a way of pushing back against this disgraceful situation.
This story of student loans in America is beyond baffling to me! I live in a city of about 100,000 people at the bottom of New Zealand. Our city has a university at the heart of it, which is very good, and educates to a world-class standard. I am currently about to start the 5th year of my two undergraduate degrees, a BA, and a BSc. My student loan, paid by the government is interest-free forever, it is not until I begin earning over $40,000 a year, or I live overseas for more than 6 months, that I have to pay it back. If your parents combined earn under $50,000 year, the government pays you an allowance of up to $192 (for a single person with no dependent children), which you don’t have to pay back. That is the good part. The bad part: My soon-to-be husband earn a COMBINED income of $648 a MONTH, we can’t afford the petrol to drive our un-registered car, so we walk everywhere, with a 2 year old who comes to my classes with me as we cannot afford childcare. He works a job outside of study, but cannot earn more than $80 a week, otherwise our student allowance is deducted at the rate of 90 cents in the dollar of whatever he earns over the $80. All our money goes to food, clothes, and everything else a 2 year old needs, and we live in holey socks, 5 woollen blankets on the bed, and a flatmate, in order to help us make rent. The poster above who earns $1200 a month – I would love to have that sort of money – I could maybe pay the power bill on time, afford to buy meat to eat for dinner, or a new pair of socks. Priorites people, and I am sorry for the horrible student loan scheme in America – while our scheme is worlds apart, I feel for those of you working three jobs to eat while in college. I hope my son grows up in far better conditions – and he never has to visit the food bank monthly in order for his family to eat.
Thanks for giving me this forum to bitch – although it is completely non-topic 🙂
xx
I read this column and replies months ago and it has stayed in my mind. I just saw this article and thought it relevant enough to post.
http://www.alternet.org/economy/156153/the_ones_we%27ve_lost:_the_student_loan_debt_suicides/?page=entire
Regarding the previous link I posted, this paragraph was most enlightening about how student loan debt increases exponentially. There is something seriously wrong:
Koch originally borrowed $69,000 in 1997. The majority of that money was loans for law school, seemingly, he says, to “better myself.†After he graduated from Touro Law School, Koch struggled to find steady employment and eventually he defaulted on his loans. He was immediately slapped with $50,000 in penalties. For years, he had been filling out deferment forms every six months to buy himself more time but in 2009, Sallie Mae declared him in default. At the time of this writing, Koch owes over $320,000. That sounds staggering but it’s hardly unusual. Once a person defaults on a student loan, the balance grows exponentially, with interest compounding on interest, penalties and fees. By the time he “retires,†in 23 years, Koch figures he will owe close to $1.9 million. He can’t get even subprime credit, he tells me, and it’s not like there’s any way out of his trap: student loan debt cannot be absolved through bankruptcy.
New to The Rumpus, love–along with many others–the Dear Sugar column.
I love Sugar but she missed alot of the complexities of the situation in this reply. Her is my story: I put myself through college and graduate school. In the end my debt was 40K. The year I was to start repaying I had a breakdown. Eventually I was hospitalized for depression. Anyway this year I fell into default. It just so happened that that year Clinton new law fining defaulters $10,000. So now I owed 50K. I tried to repay the loan over the years, but I had to take many deferments. With interest my debt is now over 100k. Wearing Thin, I hear you bigtime. I think about my debt morning, noon and night. I am current on my loan, but will be repaying until I am in my 70s. If you follow this issue — you can find links in the New York Times story — you will see that people are really suffering out there. Some report being suicidal, some report not filing income taxes because they dropped out of the system completely.
By the way I am a very responsible person who has supported myself since the age of 17. Nobody gave me a nickel toward my education or anything else.
Of course I take full responsibility for paying my debt. But I resent Clinton balancing the budget on the backs of defaulters. What’s the sense of punishing defaulters, many of whom may have had legitimate problems? And did they really recover that money? Most likely it created panic and people dropping out of the system, not filing income taxes etc etc.
Wearing Thin, hang in there. Take advantage of deferments, but dont let your interest pile up. Some people owe 20k, some owe 200k. It sounds like you have things pretty much under control. Good on you!
“I’m a socialist at heart, but when it comes to the actual, individual way we live our lives, I adhere to an entirely pull-oneself-up-by-one’s-bootstraps creed. Nobody’s going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you’re rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice. And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things have befallen you. Self-pity is a dead end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It’s up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.” Sugar, that is just so brilliant. You help me verbalise my dearest values and remind me to kick self-pity to the curb because I’m better than that. Thank you.
Wearing Thin – I understand your anxiety, because I too have frequently put pressure on myself to be in a better financial position, to live a more sorted life, and to delay the things I enjoy until I can “truly” afford them. But you know what I realised when I turned forty with a student loan, a special needs child with whom I frequently stay home unpaid, a rented home in a country where owning your own home is THE goal and no loving partner on the horizon? I realised that I could die, with these circumstances still in place next week/month/year – and I want to spend time and money on experiences with my children AND buy sexy red shoes before I go!! I’m selective – I pay the rent and utilities first, I live a simple lifestyle, and I work hard, but life can’t be all about duty and it certainly can’t be about waiting for other people’s permission. So here’s what I suggest – Do NOT wait for your student loan to be paid off. DO NOT wait for your parents to notice how great you are. Work hard, get that qualification that’s going to give you income and self respect. And at the same time – LIVE NOW. Immediately. Hang out with people who’ve already noticed that they like you, and buy something pretty. Today.
Wow, I am so confused.
I consolidated my student loans and then went to grad school, took out more student loans, then went to get my credential and took out more student loans. I had no idea that consolidating student loans meant you couldn’t go to grad school. Maybe someone should have told me that before I consolidated my student loans and then went to grad school.
Going to college is a choice. You obtain something of value, a degree, and you pay for it with dollars and work. Why is that a hard equation to understand? If you don’t pay for it, who will? It’s not free. Why would you expect anyone else to pay for something that provides value to you?
I thought Sugar’s advice in terms of the student loans was fantastically spot on. Yet, the final paragraph of Wearing Thin’s letter makes me think that there’s more to her sadness, and to her letter, than just the loans issue.
This could be completely off, but Wearing Thin seems to be aching for greater emotional support from her family. She’s just wrapping that child-like need in financial support complaints.
So here’s my advice to you, Wearing Thin, if this is the issue. The finances can’t be helped, but the family can.
Unfortunately, since your family can’t see your path of being your own amazing young woman, you’re going to have to do a lot of the growing on your own. It’s only when you have a better idea of who you want to be, that you can coach others in how to perceive you. You’ll have to be the more understanding and patient one. It will be lonely.
But, likely, if you stick with it, they will learn something magical from you. Most importantly, you will have the supportive family you’ve been craving. You’ll just have to guide them towards that. And find many good friends along the way.
Click here to subscribe today and leave your comment.