Student Loans: A Life Sentence of Punishment For Grad School

I used to be one of those people who thought that arguments for the abolishment of student loan debt were mostly whiny. They're called loans. We knew that when we got them. I pay my loans. I've written extensively about my complicity in the insanity of higher ed debt. I accept my responsibility.

But student loan debt in its current form is not only unfair, it's unjust. Those of us who took on greater debt even than the average college student are going to, en masse, be impoverished for life under this system. Current student loan debt has huge and obvious implications for the economy, as discussed in these articles, but I wonder if people are considering the plight of a smaller but still significant population of under- and unemployed academics who will be saddled by enormous payments (not to mention the outrageous effects of interest on the final bill. for a much longer period of time).

I'm talking about myself here.



It's Campus Equity Week Oct 28 and the focus is on adjunct justice, the move to technology to replace teaching, and (ETA) student debt relief. Some of their events (e.g. the play For Profit, which explores not only the moral quandary of working in for profit, but the issue of corporatization of all higher ed, and the issue of student debt. This is the precise situation of someone I am very close to, btw.) I want to make it clear that public higher ed is just as guilty of fleecing students as for profit. I have some personal experience with for profit education. Its critics are not wrong. But higher ed is complicit in the boom-and-bust loan cycle as well. It's not a bad guys versus good guys scenario.

The real kicker is that there is no way to declare bankruptcy on student loan debt. If you go on an ill-advised shopping spree and can't pay off your new furniture and car in a few years, you can discharge the debt or deal with it for pennies on the dollar. This could even apply to gambling debts. But student loans are not an option.

Kids -- and I was a kid -- in my situation graduating in the early oughts, were sold a bill of goods.

We cruised into grad school on the tail end of an economic boom, during a time when credit card companies set up tables in the commons and gave us free t-shirts if we signed up.

We were told by our professors that jobs would be waiting, that the baby boomers would retire and with more and more students attending college every year, well. The math is clear.

We were permitted to recklessly take on more and more debt with little to no counseling about what it would mean for us down the road.

We were recruited eagerly as part of a higher education scheme predicated on the cheap labor of willing graduate students to deal with the masses of students. We were underpaid for our work and many of us were denied benefits to subsidize higher education, despite the astronomical inflation of tuition over the last decade. Is the current structure of TAs anything other than intellectual sharecropping? Are loans not liens? And is our harvest not decimated by factors out of our control?

And then the economy tanked, and the job market for academia went from "precarious" to "deadly."

 

Rolling Jubilee has great data on this, and their goal is to buy off student loan debt, but look at the small amount they've raised ($60k to fight $12mil in debt. I can't afford to give them money to help people like me, because I can barely help people like me!). Not nearly enough of us are engaged in an issue and fight that should be at the heart of the post-academic movement. ETA just discovered the Student Debt Crisis website. Awesome!

We are all in this situation, post-ac-ers! We are Margaret Mary if she had taken out $100,000 to pay for her education. This is a CRISIS for those of us in a new class made of the highly educated and financially screwed. Inasmuch as adjunct issues are issues of concern for anyone post-ac/alt-ac/higher ed, student loan debt is an issue for us all. No one interested in higher education reform can ignore the issue of student loan debt and its profound and unjust impact. 

My partner and I work full time and we are treading water each month. At a time in our lives when we could start 529s for our daughters or think ahead towards retirement, we feel lucky to make ends meet. We sometimes do not. We don't qualify for welfare because of our income, but that figure doesn't take into account the $1k we pay each month to debt collectors. We have very little credit card debt compared to a LOT of people, own 2 cars that are over 10 years old, and a house with a very reasonable mortgage compared to our earnings. We're on IBR. We are not extravagant spenders. Every month we scale back and scale back. Our lives more and more closely resemble the lives of working class earners despite our upper middle class education. (I'm basing this on wikipedia. Forgive me. If Sloan Sabbith could explain this to me, it would be great.) We're one car breakdown away from screwed. Christmas this year looks... iffy. I'm not sure our kids will go to college even though they are CRAZY smart. I mean, what were we thinking, to have a family at all? LOL, right??!

I did some reading about the structure of federal lending and was really appalled to learn about the difference in rules that apply to these programs versus garden variety debt. I never took out private loans because the word on the street was that they were horrible, predatory, ruthless collectors. I thought, The benevolent government has all these plans! All this flexibility! Loan forgiveness! Boy, what a crock. If you default, you are not eligible. * If your student loan servicer changes three, four times, it is easy to accidentally miss a payment because you have to learn a new system, reestablish payment dates and procedures, etc. Everyone is late sometimes. If you're deciding to pay a grand for student loans or a grand to fix your car, you're gonna fix your car! Ten years of absolute perfection is unrealistic, and amounts to is indentured servitude, and there is no wiggle room.

Imagine the drain on the economy. The percentage of under/unemployed college grads is crazy; the percentage of grad students even more so. Those numbers are growing, and many of us are facing 10, 20, 30+ years of this financial situation. It's simply unsustainable. It's economic suicide. It's beyond a disproportional response to ignorant, poor choices. It punishes everyone. It's corrupt and lousy and cruel and I'm adding my voice to those who think abolishment is appropriate and just.

 

* Edited to clarify and correct information about eligibility for PSLF. Don't forget PSLF could be repealed and there's no guarantee it will exist in 10 years. The more you know!

I'm In Love With the Cronk of Higher Ed, Our Very Own Onion!

Post-acers, why haven't you told me about The Cronk of Higher Ed?!! This is post-academic recovery gold!! The Cronk is our very own Onion, skewering higher ed practices and issues and I'm in LOVE with it. At HTLA we firmly believe that satire and humor that pokes fun at and reveal the flaws in higher education are crucial to our academic recovery. Laughter is the best medicine!

Here are a few Cronk highlights to get your started, but you should subscribe to their twitter feed and like them on facebook for a regular dose of reminders as to why you're OUT. After that, check out our other satire and schadenfreude resources for post-ac folks in the category links above.

MOOCS apply open philosophy to faculty recruitment. "Learn Today! Recruited Melanie Drake to teach advanced literature. “We discovered her ‘Twilight’ fan fiction blog and knew our students would love her,” said Pembers."

Small college steals and markets it's overworked adjuncts' home remedies for stress and exhaustion. "The remedies, grouped together under the moniker “Little Black Bag,” promises to revolutionize the floundering college’s fiscal health — and maybe its physical health as well. As adjuncts sign away their rights to privacy and intellectual property when they are hired, the college’s claim to intellectual property rights to 'Little Black Bag' felt consistent."

University requires adjuncts to wear ankle bracelets to keep their hours under 30 and thus avoid insurance requirements. “I put in over 50 hours on campus last week but really only worked about 23, according to my anklet,” said one instructor. “I’ve eliminated class discussions and I don’t call on students with raised hands anymore. The Provost says that I’m a model instructor and may even recommend me for another course next semester. If I keep this up, I might earn enough to cover gas money for my commute.”

Check it out!

Link Roundup: Adjuncting Issues

Here's a roundup of links to consider if you're an adjunct who's considering leaving, or if you're thinking about adjuncting as part of your post-academic plan. Adjuncting is easy to fall into, especially for those of us who find teaching an immensely rewarding life and would like it to be our career (after all, that's why a lot of us went to grad school). But it has obvious pitfalls and perils that can make it unsustainable or unappealing as a post-ac career. Here's some wisdom from around the web.

Rob Shenk via Compfight

Amanda Krauss @ WorstProfessorEver deconstructs some myths about teaching as a vocational calling, part 1 and part 2. Krauss writes:

I don’t believe teaching is a vocation. I believe it’s vocational, as in something you can train people to do. As in something you could treat as a means to make money, and actively sell as a lucrative career to talented individuals. And something that you’d damn well better train people to do well, because if you count only on people being born to do it and wiling to accept lousy pay for it, you’re going to get what you pay for.

Krauss continues by  bluntly questioning the notion that an individual teacher can truly make a difference in the current system of higher education in this post. She writes:

This is why I left. I decided that there was no way in hell that any individual teacher could make a whit of difference within this behemoth and nonfunctional system. I also deduced that teaching — real teaching — was a product no one wanted in this consumer-driven culture. No “customer” ever wants to be told they’re average or their project sucks and needs to be started all over again, especially by a real person instead of a computer. Making those computers do stuff, on the other hand…well, that looked like something that would continue to be in demand.

In "Down With the Academic Martyr," Caroline Roberts urges us to be more selfish, arguing " it is time for teachers to set boundaries and expect them to be followed. It’s one thing to do your best, but it’s quite another to let people take advantage of you."

Karen Kelsky @ TheProfessorIsIn compares adjuncting to Stockholm Syndrome:

Stop with the “alas”! You don’t need to tell me this is an ends justify the means argument. But seriously, throwing yourself personally on the sacrificial altar of student care does not change a fundamentally exploitative system. Your job is to protect yourself.

 

Be sure to check out the adjunct-focused sites on our "Resources" sidebar to the left. What we discuss here is just the tip of the iceberg.

Seeking Contributors to Post-Ac E-book and Website

If you've always wanted to share your story of academia; written a post-academic/alt-blog; or benefited from the blog posts you've found here, mama nervosa, From Grad School to Happiness, Project Reinvention, or Ruminations: Life After Academia (and countless other post-ac sites), we want you to join the conversation! 

We plan for this website to be a "one stop shop" for people in the process of leaving academia. We're interested in short, friendly, advice articles on different aspects of leaving. If you have something in mind, please contact us at the emails below. We are also seeking contributions for our e-book on leaving academia. See CFP (har har!) below.

Moving On: Personal Stories of Leaving Academia (tentatively titled)

Have you left academia? Or are you currently in the process of leaving? Share your story!

As post-academic bloggers, we know firsthand that there is a desire for stories that explore more than just the career aspects of leaving the ivory tower. People want to know how, when, and why you quit; emotional issues related to quitting; and examples of post-academic success. We envision this book as a source of advice and support for readers who have quit graduate school before getting their Ph.D., people leaving academia even after they have finished their degrees, and people who are adjuncting or working in academia who are looking to leave. Many stories of the post-academic transition have been told on personal blogs and websites, including our blogs and web site www.howtoleaveacademia.com (forthcoming), but this is the first collection has been organized to speak directly to people’s experiences leaving academia.

We’re looking for thoughtful, personal pieces (non-fiction or creative non-fiction) that tell a story or develop a theme related to the process of quitting academia. Like any good paper, the essay should have a core thesis or concept that you’re exploring through your writing. We prefer submissions that are relatively jargon-free and more casual in writing style. Your essay can be any length, with a general goal of 5-10 pages double spaced (but we’ll consider shorter or longer!).

If you have poetry, art, or other (digitized) creative work that explores these themes, we’d be interested in that, too.

This collection will focus primarily on what happened after you quit; thus, we are not interested in treatises about the failures of grad school or the problems in higher education. You’re welcome to explore the reasons and circumstances under which you left, but please continue the narrative forward from there. You can be as anonymous as you like, although please include enough detail that the reader can be drawn into your story. We invite you to explore the messiness, difficulty, and contradictions in the quitting process. Not every story has a happy ending, and that’s OK. We encourage submissions on any of these topics, as well as proposals for essays that explore any gaps between them:

• How, when, and why you left academia: hopes/expectations versus realities in grad school, specific incidents/anecdotes, the job market, what you wish you’d known.


• Emotional dimensions of leaving -- loss or changes of identity, “deprogramming” from academic thought, relationship difficulties and transformations, isolation, mental/physical health issues, joys and new discoveries, family issues, etc.


• Career Transitions: Teaching stories, writing stories, stories of how you discovered a new vocation/path.


• Alt-Ac Careers, Adjuncting -- Life on campus when you’re not a prof or student, changes in relationships with “the academy.”


• Success Stories: how quitting changed your life for the better, how happy you are, how glad you are to be gone.


• Failure stories: screwing up, falling down, awful jobs, bad experiences, floundering, despair.

If you want to share a simpler or more straightforward story of your post-academic journey, please consider submitting to the website (email Lauren or Currer at the addresses below and specify that your submission is for the website).

Timeline:
250 word abstracts due: Feb 1st
Goal of getting back to accepted folks mid-February
Final essays due: April 1st
Goal of publication by graduation in May 2013! :)

Email submissions with “E-Book Submission” in the subject line to Lauren at lauren.nervosa@gmail.com or Currer at projectreinvention12@gmail.com  by Feb 1 2013.