Reflections on Student Loans, Wage Slavery, and the Myth of Upward Mobility

Recently when I contacted my student loan lender I asked when my projected payoff date would be for my debt of nearly $50,000. The person on the other line replied matter-of-factly, that at the rate I was currently paying it off, it would be retired in 2038. “I will be 73 years old!,” I exclaimed. Great, I can look forward to paying $253 a month for the next 23 years.

It didn’t start out this way. I attended college mainly on need based and academic scholarships, but it was Cornell’s policy in the 80s to make families assume a minimal financial contribution, which could be in the form of a student loan. I was the oldest child in a family of 13 children, who subsisted on $13,000 a year. Cornell’s financial aid office decided that based on my family’s financial situation, their contribution should be $2500 a year, which of course, they could not afford to pay. I took a federal student loan for $2500 for each year, and by the end of 4 years was $10,000 in debt, but I left with a BA degree, and higher earning power than I would have without one, but still did not earn enough to pay the minimum the lender required to pay off the loan.

I survived by filing forbearances, and eventually went back to grad school full time at Boston College, where I could file an interest free deferral on my student loan payments, but in the pursuit of my Master’s degree in English accrued another $14,000 in debt for 2 years of living expenses, this despite having won an English Department Teaching Fellowship that paid my tuition for 2 semesters. I graduated with a total of $24,000 in debt. I decided, practically, that I could not live on the salary of an assistant adjunct professor or lecturer, opted to return to a 9-5 job in a library, the mainstay of my subsistence for many years.

I continued my education getting a second Master’s in Library Science, at Simmons College that I paid off completely using a combination of scholarship money, and $10,000 of my own money. Though I have no debt from this degree, I accrued interest on need based forebearances on my prior loan debt while pursuing this degree. I did not have time, while working full time, to take two classes at a time, which would have qualified me for an interest free deferral. With the high cost of living in Boston, I still did not earn enough to pay the minimum on my student loans and at one point defaulted on my loans. In climbing out of this situation I decided to consolidate my loans in a direct loan. Capitalized interest added another $10,000 to my debt. Need based forbearances in ensuing years brought my debt to where it currently is: nearly $50,000, though there were periods where I was able to pay the minimum they required, and I am able to do so now with very little left over. All of this debt was acquired prior to 1992.

My salary in my current job does not reflect the amount of education I have. I have worked in my position at Harvard for over 20 years, and my education has not opened up any professional opportunities for me outside of two part time professional library jobs that I worked to supplement my income for many years. After working these two part time library jobs in addition to my full time job at Harvard to pay off $25,000 in unsecured credit card debt that I had accrued mainly by using my credit cards to supplement my income, I decided to simplify my life, and resigned from one of my part time jobs. When my father passed away in 2012, I resigned from the other. At least my union pay scale increases now allowed me to work one job if I budgeted carefully. It makes it a little easier that I do not own a car, and I do not have children. I cannot imagine the stress that people who have families to support must be under, but then again, I can. I came from such a family.

My situation is not unique. There are many people who take on thousands of dollars of student loan debt under the assumption that more education will make them more economically secure, when the opposite may actually be true. Globalization has had the unexpected impact of driving down the standard of living to the lowest common denominator. Getting an education ensures us mainly that we will be indebted to the big banks for the rest of our lives. Workers at all educational levels are facing a threat to their livelihoods, with corporate downsizing, increases in health care costs, outsourcing, automation, and employers increasing profit margins at the expense of their employees, but those with student loan debt, without the resources to pay it off, can look forward to an additional burden that may well follow them into retirement, without delivering the promised economic opportunities.