I VOLUNTEER … ish : Student Debt and the Millennial Path
My recent article about my experience paying off student loans and a rather full-throated call for substantial progress toward student debt forgiveness has sparked far more conversations than I would have imagined.
Among the responses there has been a predictable generational divide.
My millennial peers and colleagues — most of whom are or were similarly indebted — have said: Shit, that’s a lot of money! Thanks for saying something.
Other people —starting with those just a few years older — were simultaneously congratulatory and no-small-bit creeped out at the suggestion that someone who paid off a quarter million dollars in student debt would be FOR student debt forgiveness for others.
Now, before we sharpen our millennial pitchforks and power-up our cancellation rays, these folks largely grew up in worlds—or have aspirationally imprinted memories of worlds—where either or both of the following scenarios were actually “a thing.”
a. working your way through college was possible
b. providing food, housing, and healthcare for a family with one income derived from a job not requiring advanced accreditation was also possible
Both of these “things” actually existed as recently as 40 or so years ago. However, to those of us who graduated high school in 2000 or later, these things have never been possible. This divide in thinking is, at its core, experiential. You know what you know.
The only way to advance the conversation about what student debt forgiveness truly means is for more and more indebted and formerly-indebted people to continue speaking out and telling our stories — as uncomfortable and shame-inducing as it might be.
The most problematic of the pre-millennial responses to my story was a nuanced category offering congratulations for paying off our “voluntary debt.” Let me say that again for the back row: our “voluntary debt.”
Here is the question that comes to the heart of this uniquely American, deeply intractable Student Debt Crisis.
Is student debt “voluntary”?
Did we chose this?
Describing student debt as “voluntary debt” is a fundamental categorical error. To imagine that mortgage debt, auto loan debt, and credit card debt are of the same character as educational debt is myopic and woefully — indeed, catastrophically — individualistic.
To my mind, education and medical care are of the same category. They ought to be equally available to those that need it and can avail of it. Not everyone needs chemotherapy, and not everyone needs a medical degree. Those who need it, those whose capacities and sense of vocation mandate they pursue it, ought well to have access to it.
The inextricability of education, health care, and the costs associated with come into horrifically fine focus in end-of-life story of Prof. Leon Lederman. To pay mounting medical bills this former University of Chicago professor auctioned off the Nobel Prize he received for research on subatomic particles.
The bottom line is this: Education is not a commodity to be leveraged. It is not capitol to be expended. Educational is, at its core, focused on the community. Is the collective need of a doctor “voluntary”? Is one’s need of a lawyer, of a primary educator, of an architect, of a social support worker “voluntary”? Certainly not! Then the training of those specialists for the sake of the common good is not “voluntary” either!
This is true of the doctors, lawyers, and machinists. It is equally true of the ethicists, artists, and educators. So many other “advanced” nations know this to be true. It is a uniquely American folly to refuse to accept it.
Student debt is not voluntary, and there is no congratulations to be received for paying off a mountain of student debt any more than there is congratulations to be won for scaling a border wall to save your life or amputating a limb to stop gangrene.
Rachael and I did what we had to do to survive, and we are going to work just as hard to make sure that this oppressive weight might be lifted from as many as possible.
As I said in my last article …
There are 45 Million of us. We owe a combined $1.6 Trillion. There is a whole generation not living into the fullness of who we are because of how we must configure our finances, and, consequently, our lives. … How uninspired we will become when medical professionals and artists, clergy and academics, scientists and other specialists must become financial automata, seeking out as much money as they can to pay down as much as they can? How cheapened will our politics and common life be by values unanimated, ideas unexplored, and truths unexpressed?
Our collective energies must focus on creating a new vision for the common good in which people can specialize in a diverse array of jobs and professions as their giftedness, passions, and work-ethics allow. This will never be possible as long as a generation of professionals that ought to be entering into its most financially productive years continues to buckle under a weight it did not create in service of a future we did not choose.
So, what about you? What is your story with student debt? Share it in the comments, or write your own medium.com essay about it and link to it below!
