Despite the name tags, the dinner turned out to resemble something more like an AA meeting, an earnest session of group therapy. Everyone had their story about the problems caused by their student loans and how they were trying, one day at a time, to improve things, and no story was exceptional, including my own. Ian, an employee for Google who had recently successfully paid off his debt from a Columbia MBA programme, became something like my sponsor for the evening. I told him I had a long way to go. At least you’re doing something about it, he said, sincerely.
We sat down to dinner. Across from me was Mira, a defence attorney from Brooklyn, who attended law school at Stanford. Her payments amount to $2,300 a month, more than double my own. When I asked her why she came to this event, she glanced at me as if the answer should have been obvious: her payments are $2,300 a month. The table, myself included, looked on her with an odd reverence. She wore a business suit and had her hair pulled back, but I saw her as something like the sage and weathered biker of the group, talking in her wisdom about accepting the things you cannot change.
Most of all, I wondered what they would do if their own children had to take out loans to pay for college
After the food was served, a waiter came by with a stack of to-go boxes, which sat on the edge of the table untouched for a while as everyone cautiously eyed them. The group was reluctant at first, but then Ian said, The chicken was actually pretty good, as he scooped it into one of the boxes. Mira shrugged, took a fork, and said: This is a little tacky, but I’d hate to waste free food, and the rest of the table followed her lead. Maybe the next generation would do better, but I felt like we were broke and broken. No number of degrees or professional successes would put us back together again. For now, though, we knew where our next meal was coming from.
I have spent a great deal of time during the last e for my debt. Whose fault was it? My devoted parents, for encouraging me to attend a school they couldn’t afford? The banks, which should have never lent money to people who clearly couldn’t pay it back to begin with, continuously exploiting the hope of families like mine, and quick to exploit us further once that hope disappeared? Or was it my fault for not having the foresight to realise it was a mistake to spend roughly $200,000 on a school where, in order to get my degree, I kept a journal about reading Virginia Woolf? (Sample passage, which assuredly blew my mind at the time: We are interested in facts because we are interested in myth. We are interested in myth insofar as myth constructs facts.) The problem, I think, runs deeper than blame. The foundational myth of an entire generation of Americans was the false promise that education was priceless that its value was above or beyond its cost. College was not a right or a privilege, but an inevitability on the way to a meaningful adulthood. What an irony that the decisions I made about college when I was 17 have derailed such a goal.
In the summer of 2017, my father, now nearing 70, had lost another job, so I finally removed him as a guarantor and refinanced my loans with one of the few companies that provides such a service payday loans in Clifton NJ, SoFi
I used to wonder if the people who worked for these lenders had families of their own, and if they would ever find themselves bankrupt, wondering where they were going to live. After 10 years of living with the fallout of my own decisions about my education, I have come to think of my debt as like an alcoholic relative from whom I am estranged, but who shows up to ruin happy occasions. But when I first got out of school and the reality of how much money I owed finally struck me, the debt was more of a constant and explicit preoccupation, a matter of life and death.
My father had suffered in the previous two years. In a matter of months, he had lost everything he had worked most of his adult life to achieve first his career, then his home, then his dignity. He had become a 60-year-old man who had quite reluctantly shaved his greying, 40-year-old mustache in order to look younger, shuffling between failed job interviews where he was often told he had too much experience. He was ultimately forced out of the life he’d known, dragging with him, like some 21-first-century Pa Joad, a U-Haul trailer crammed with family possessions, including, at the insistence of my mother, large plastic tubs of my childhood action figures.
My wife, who agreed to marry me last autumn, would help with the payments when she could. Sharing the burden of my debt with my spouse instead of my parents was a small, depressing victory, a milestone perhaps unique to members of my generation, one that must have carried the same kind of significance that purchasing a home and having a mortgage had to my parents.
L et’s say I was morbidly intrigued. The day after Valentine’s Day, I went to a Mexican restaurant in the financial district for a SoFi community dinner this was not a singles event, but simply a free meal. There had been another of these dinners near my apartment the week before, but it had, to my surprise, quickly sold out. The restaurant was packed with an after-work crowd in business attire, and SoFi had rented out the back room, where a few dozen people had gathered, all wearing name tags and discussing financial woes. Sid, a software developer from Queens who had racked up credit card debt after college, told me that the debt was a unifying force at these gatherings. When there’s a break in the conversation, someone can just say, So, debt, huh?’ and things will get going again, he said. If we walked outside of this room, he continued, gesturing to the suits by the bar, everyone out there would have debt, too. It’s just a little more out in the open for us.
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