Sunday, May 28, 2017

Calculating My Student Loan Debt


I've just calculated that I've spent $49,773.45 over the past 7 years on my student loans and I still have over $7,000 to go. I've spent -$11,798.17 in interest alone. That's 23% of my total loan payments and 31% of the principle.
It's fucking unbelievable how expensive college is in the US today. I can tell you that my college was definitely not worth over 50 grand. Not even close. The quality of education I received was at best worth 15 thousand dollars.

A friend of mine moved to Germany for their free college. He's getting his MBA and no cost and he gets to take it in English! We met at the same undergraduate college, so we were both in the same situation. But he's paid off his loans and is now doing the smart thing. I would never get a master's degree in the US given our system unless I somehow got a scholarship (or won the lottery). The idea of taking on more debt is so depressing I could never even seriously contemplate it. And to make matters worse, Trump's education secretary Betsy DeVos is pealing back protections for borrowers, just as many of us suspected. 

My situation is fairly typical today. I went to a for-profit school. At the time I was somewhat naive as to what I was really getting into. But I graduated, unlike about 50% those who go to college, and in the end it worked out. Since college I have never made less than $18 an hour, and now I make nearly double that. I've always had good healthcare and benefits while employed. So if I had to do it over again, knowing that my degree did help me out, I would say that I'd probably do it over again. But I'm not fully sure on that. I definitely would've been smarter with my loans. I fucked up my loan management and ended up paying a lot more interest than I could have.

I absolutely hate the idea of being in debt to someone. With an extra 50 thousand dollars I could've put a down payment on a house. I could've bought a Tesla. I could've vacationed around the world many times over. I could have paid my rent for years. Heck, I could've bought a wife from Russia! I could have rescued a woman from poverty and gave her a new life in America. Sadly, that will never happen now. 


Student debt is crushing my generation. We're a trillion dollars in the hole. This is making the American dream of owning a home nearly impossible. It's making saving up for retirement very difficult, as young adults push back saving for a decade or more to pay down their loans during that time. 

What we need is tuition free college like other first world countries do so generations of Americans do not have to suffer under thousands of dollars of debt like I have. I proposed an idea where the cost of public college is free if you get an A in every class. If you get a B it's $50, if you get a C it's $100, if you get a D it's $150. If you fail it, you pay the full price of what it normally is in the state if it's more. Each state can set up its own cost system within federal guidelines. At the rate above, a person getting a D in every course for a bachelor's degree at 40 courses would end up paying a maximum of $6,000 in tuition. Someone getting a B in every class would pay $2,000. This is far cheaper than most students are already paying in public colleges. 

Isn't that a smart idea? Shouldn't college be cheap and affordable and incentivized to encourage students to do their best? Instead, with what we have today you can get straight As and owe a hundred thousand dollars on a bullshit degree and end up making barely $40 thousand after college. If you're lucky.

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