First, it might be good to ask what the American dream actually is. For most writers, it means that if you get an education, work hard, you will pull the ability to get a good job, find the love of your life and get married and support a family in a quality condo or house, have a decent set of wheels (in most venues), two cars probably, take a couple of weeks off a year, have enough for holiday gifts and decent clothes… and even go out for a meal once and a while. But for most young people, that dream is a long, long ways away, many years after graduating with the terminal degree… when that student loan debt gets under control.
With American student loan debt hitting $1.2 trillion, and post-2005 bankruptcy law making avoiding that debt nearly impossible, each part of that dream begins to crumble. Tuition over the past few decades has consistently exceeded the rises in the cost of living, sometimes by double or even triple that rise. And as the credit crunch is added to the contraction of student financial aid at most universities, particular those that are state run, families are now staggering under the burden of student loans. And God help you if you incur debt and do not graduate; you get nothing but the burden!
Add to that nasty mix are the lower pay levels, lower quality of work, impaired promotion and advancement opportunities and often the temporary or part-time nature of the news jobs that are obtainable. With displaced super-experienced workers willing to take the dregs of current offerings, those seeking entry-level work are often finding menial opportunities are all they can find. Still, that student debt has to be paid. And the numbers are so high, it’s like having a big mortgage without a house.
Be not only are those job opportunities kind of sucky, but each part of the American dream listed in the above scenario is finding “impossibility” or “serious delay” as a fundamental part of life’s equation. Even marriage.
“‘People cannot participate in the American dream because of student debt,’ said Natalia Abrams, executive director and co-founder of StudentDebtCrisis.org. [For example,] Cody Hounanian, 23, graduated from University of California, Los Angeles last year with about $30,000 in debt. He worked part-time at an In-N-Out Burger restaurant near campus throughout college and now works full-time as a manager at Whole Foods in his hometown of Santa Clarita, Calif. He is in the process of applying to law school.
“He’s not married, doesn’t expect to be anytime soon and puts part of the blame on the burden of student debt… ‘I’m sure there are people who say, ‘I don’t want to have a husband or a wife who is $100,000 in debt,’ but I think the real problem is more indirect. There’s almost not enough time to go out and start a family,’ he said. ‘It’s an aspect that people forget. Planning and investing: forming relationships get in the way of that… I don’t want to sound materialistic, but there’s a financial aspect,’ he said. ‘In finding someone, there has to be a cash flow in order to take someone out.’
“Abrams said that even people with decent-paying jobs are delaying that walk down the aisle because of debt. ‘If you owe $100,000 to $150,000 in student loans, you’re paying $1,000 to $1,500 a month. It’s cost-prohibitive,’ she said… ‘Everything from saving for a home to saving for retirement is completely off the table,’ Abrams said.
“Student debt isn’t the only reason young people are putting off marriage, of course. Women are putting significantly more time into earning advanced degrees. And jobs for less-educated Americans have withered, causing a longer search for a career that can provide a middle-class lifestyle…
“While there is no specific data on student debt-related delays to marriage, a recent study by the Pew Research Center shows that a record number of Americans have never married. The study found the median age at first marriage is now 27 for women and 29 for men. In 1960, the median age was 20 for women and 23 for men.
“Student loan experts say indebtedness is weighing heavily in the young adults’ decisions to get married, buy homes, and save for retirement, however.” NBC.com, October 7, 2014. Allowing gay and lesbian marriage may have saved the marriage industry, but student loans and the apparent disdain that our politicians seem to treat education and our young people seeking higher education seem to reflect who and what we have become as a modern society: uncaring, unfeeling, not believing in ourselves or our future and thinking we can be a great nation while denigrating science and intellectual achievement. Look around you; you can see how much we have been slammed by those beliefs and our insistence on acting as if such mythologies were actually good for our country. We are definitely reaping what we have sown.
I’m Peter Dekom, and who in their right mind would design a system to build our future generations that looks anything like the costly notion of higher education in America today?
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