We Owe $356,000 In Student Loans. That’s Only Part Of The Problem.
The growing financial, mental, and social costs of higher education.
alphaspirit.it, hxdbzxy, PublicDomainPictures | Canva Yes, you read that right — my partner and I owe over $356,000 in student loans. Did you just wince? I did.
At age 41, I’m still paying off the $24,000 in loans I graduated with 20 years ago. The rest has been accumulated during my partner’s 11-year postsecondary educational journey. Since we’re married, his debt is my debt.
Every time I think about it, my heart starts to palpitate. Mostly, I try not to.
A financial advisor once told us that as long as the loans have a reasonable fixed interest rate and a monthly payment we can afford, we just need to put debt “over there” in our heads. “Over there,” I’ve found, is a good place for it to live.
But there are times when our debt has loomed over us, impossible to ignore — like that time when we found out that a few small private loans we’d taken out for my partner’s undergraduate education had somehow ballooned into over $90,000.
It’s astonishingly easy, we learned, to fall into serious student loan debt. But it’s not just that it’s harder to pay for college — the cost of which has increased by 169% over the last 40 years — it’s also that nearly everything else is harder, too. It’s harder to apply for schools, harder to gain admission, and harder to enter fields that didn’t previously require advanced degrees.
Beyond the financial cost, which is staggering in and of itself, the price tag of higher education also comes with very real mental, emotional, and social costs. And if you’re a person of color, like my partner — and particularly if you’re a first-generation wealth builder, like my partner — the costs are even more onerous.
You won’t see any mention of these in the fine print.
The financial cost
When my partner and I started dating, he had just graduated from EMT school. He proceeded to enroll in paramedic school, then took advantage of a bridge program at George Washington University to get his Bachelor’s degree.
He was in the middle of finals when our daughter was born — two weeks early. I edited one of his final papers while still loopy on painkillers from my C-section, and he completed his last semester while also serving as a stay-at-home Dad.
The financial aid office at George Washington University told us that he didn’t qualify for student aid or federal loans. To this day, I still don’t understand why.
Of course, now I desperately wish we’d pushed harder, probed deeper, and asked more questions. Instead, we took the financial aid office’s casual recommendation to look into private student loan options. I’d heard horror stories about private loans and for-profit colleges, but George Washington, I reasoned, was a reputable institution that surely had our best interests at heart.
It’s also among the 50 most expensive colleges in the United States, but luckily, the bridge program had an annual price tag that was one-third the amount of its regular tuition. Plus, my partner could graduate in two years. With a few small loans, it all seemed very doable.
The private student loans, as it turns out, were easy to get. Over the next few years, we applied for, and received, several — both for his undergraduate courses and for additional prerequisite courses he took in preparation for graduate school.
We had no idea — no idea — that interest accrued during the so-called “grace period” when my partner was still in school. It’s easy for us to feel stupid, to feel ashamed. Believe me, we’ve felt it all.
But sometimes you just don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t know what questions to ask. You’re young and trusting, and you assume the loans are OK because a financial aid office at a respectable educational institution told you to get them. You assume they’re OK because a respectable bank agreed to lend them to you. You assume it’s all going to be OK.
Despite my fancy, expensive education, no one ever taught me about fixed versus variable interest rates or good debt versus bad debt. No one taught me about credit scores, investment strategies, or grace periods.
When my partner went to graduate school — which, as a Black man navigating a white-collar world, he saw as the most certain and direct route to job security and professional respect— the grace period became even longer. The interest continued to grow.
But the banks eventually ran out of grace. I stared at the numbers, adding them up and adding them up again. I thought there must be some mistake.
By that time, my partner was two semesters away from completing his doctorate program, where he had casually racked up another couple hundred grand in debt. We’d had another child by then, and my stepson was living with us, too. We could scarcely afford the childcare I needed to work, let alone tuition.
This debt was all federal, with fixed interest rates. These loans were also easy to get. As our advisor had advised, I put the graduate school debt “over there.” But Sallie Mae and Wells Fargo wanted their money back, dammit, and they wanted it now.
The mental and emotional cost
We eventually found a reasonable, fixed-rate refinancing option with First Republic for a chunk of the private debt, and my parents helped us refinance the rest. If we hadn’t had any kind of safety net — which my partner did not have before meeting me — I shudder to think where we’d be now.
But still, the debt — all $356,000 of it — is only part of the problem. Even if we had been able to pay out of pocket, the sacrifices our family made for my partner to become an occupational therapist extend far beyond the financial realm.
Our higher education system has long taken pride in exclusion. A college’s prestige is measured by how difficult it is to gain admission. A test’s validity is measured by how hard it is to pass. A field’s respectability is measured by how many years of postgraduate education it takes to enter it.
If a student fails, the working assumption is that they can’t handle the rigors of the program. Failure increases the program’s allure.
A portion of my partner’s graduate debt is for a semester of chiropractic school that he completed at the University of Western States. This institution took pride in its high attrition rate and wore it like a badge of honor.
Class ran from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. five days a week (a minor detail not shared during the admissions process) and students typically hunkered down in the library until 9 or 10 p.m. My partner was the only Black student in the program and one of a handful of students with children.
He failed his anatomy class during the first semester and received a letter over the holidays that informed him he was out of the program. Just like that.
They didn’t say, “Let’s talk.”
They didn’t say, “What unique challenges are you facing, and is there anything we can do to support you?”
They didn’t say, “Only 2.3% of chiropractors are Black, and we desperately need more diversity in the field, and we value your interest and passion, and we deemed you competent enough to gain admission to the program. This is on us, too.”
Nope, nope, and nope. Instead, they said: “You’re out. No refunds, returns, or exchanges. Happy New Year.”
My partner fell into a deep depression. It was January in Portland, Oregon and everything was gray, wet, bleak. I wasn’t sure how we would move forward as a family, how we’d find our footing again.
He eventually gained admission to Pacific University’s occupational therapy program, which was more manageable and more supportive, though it did require a three-hour daily commute. He started it when our second baby was five weeks old. Again, he was the only Black student in his class and one of a handful of parents.
Things were going okay until year three when he took on a fieldwork assignment in a school district. It’s a big deal for a fieldwork supervisor to fail a student, but his supervisor seemed to have no qualms. She failed him right at the very end, after three months of condescending to him, writing nasty emails, and generally putting him through hell.
Instead of pushing back against this supervisor, instead of listening to the parents my partner had worked with (who gushed about his unique ability to connect with their children), instead of asking whether there was any chance that a white woman in an all-white work environment might be treating my partner unfairly — instead of any of this, the program’s fieldwork coordinator made a halfhearted attempt at conversation, then shrugged her shoulders.
She said: “You’re on probation. You’ll have to repeat the semester. No refunds, returns, or exchanges.”
The depression my partner fell into was even deeper and blacker this time around. I feared for him. I feared for us. I feared for our family.
The social cost
I still believe there’s a parallel universe in which my partner never managed to graduate, a parallel universe in which we faced over $300,000 of loan debt without the benefit of a doctorate.
If there is, I’m happy I live in this universe. I consider it a minor miracle. My partner now works at an outpatient hand therapy clinic. As far as we know, he’s the only Black hand therapist in the state of Oregon.
He loves many things about his job, but he’s also really tired.
The owner of his hand therapy clinic, who is around the same age as my partner, was able to obtain an occupational therapy degree in the 1990s as an undergraduate. My partner, meanwhile, took a year of prerequisites after graduating from college, and then spent four more years in school.
But is he a better hand therapist because of it? Are increasingly advanced degree requirements producing more competent professionals? Are we fulfilling a societal demand? Quite the opposite, in fact — we’re making it harder and harder for people to become the professionals that our society desperately needs.
Kaiser Permanente is currently overwhelming my partner’s clinic with hand therapy patients because they can’t keep up. People who need help, who can’t work because they’ve messed up their hands, have to wait weeks and weeks to see a specialist.
These shortages extend far beyond hand therapy. We desperately need more doctors, and yet it’s harder than ever to become one. When my uncle was in medical school, he applied to a handful of residency programs. His daughter, my cousin, is currently being asked to apply to 80. Eight zero. Each with its own application fee, of course.
She sure as heck won’t be a better doctor because of it. Chances are, she’ll just be more mentally, emotionally, and financially depleted by the time she enters the field.
No one benefits when our healthcare professionals are burned out, stressed out, and disillusioned.
My partner’s story is fun to tell from the other side — his rise from a high school dropout who had served time in jail for a nonviolent felony conviction to a doctorate holder with a skilled job in a high-demand field.
But all told, he spent 11 years pursuing a postsecondary education to get here. He struggled through two bleak bouts of depression and started relying on anti-anxiety meds to stave off panic attacks. He missed out on most of the first year of his son’s life. And both of us will live most of the rest of our lives burdened by $356,000 of debt.
I’m in favor of student loan forgiveness, even if Biden’s plan won’t particularly benefit us. Sure, let’s clean up some of the mess by forgiving some of the debt. But let’s also not lose sight of the far more important question:
College degree or no college degree, graduate degree or no graduate degree: How can we help more Americans support their families, meaningfully contribute to society, and take pride in their work?
That’s all my partner ever wanted at the end of the day.
Kerala Taylor is an award-winning writer and co-owner of a worker-owned marketing agency. Her weekly stories are dedicated to interrupting notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife. She writes on Medium and has recently launched a Substack publication Mom, Interrupted.