Student Debt Has Killed the American Dream
How Millennials Came to Value Security over Success
Ever since I graduated college, there has been one thing at the back of my mind: my student debt. After years of reflection, I’ve still don’t know how to talk about monetary stress.
Let me tell you a story. The year is 2011. I’m 21 years old, and I’ve just graduated from college. I should be proud. Elated. Accomplished. Instead there’s only one thing on my mind, and it’s not my diploma. It’s a number.
$89,421.58.
$89,421.58 is the number that defines my life. Five figures. Almost six. I add up my student loans three times to make sure the number is right. $89,421.58. Perhaps that number should be -$89,421.58. That is how far behind I am starting.
I haven’t seen that much money in my whole life. I’m not sure I’ve seen $8,942.15. Dread begins to sink in. I frantically search for other numbers to validate my studies. The average income for a black man with a Bachelor’s degree is $36,000.
Rent and food alone are around $22,680 a year. So if I set aside that extra 13,320, I’ll pay off my loans in…around 10 years. Could 4 years of college have been worth 10 years of my life? Worth $226,800?
I realize I’ve forgotten about taxes. That $36,000 becomes $29,000, leaving $6320 per year left for loans. Plug that into the calculator I’ve begun to plan my life around and I should pay off my loans in… 69 years?
I’ll need clothes. Transit. Health insurance. The additional costs of healthcare. I don’t know what those look like yet, but I do know that it only takes $60.49 in expenses until my paltry payments aren’t enough to keep my student loan debt from increasing, year after year.
I find myself annoyed and overwhelmed. What was the point of going to college if I’m going to be paying my degree off until I’m 30? Until I’m 80? Until I die? With only 6 months until my repayment began, I’d already started to wonder if I’d made a horrible mistake.
When I think about my student debt I’m faced with painful emotions
fear and anxiety — will I ever be debt-free?
shame and self-loathing — how could I have allowed myself to get so deeply in debt?
anger — how could any system be set up to let me do this? To encourage me?
I don’t feel like I did anything wrong. I was told by society that I needed an education to get a job, that college was worth the investment, that the better college I could go to the better my life would be. And now I feel like I’ve been lied to.
Even if you make enough money to keep up your monthly payments, debt is a distant frustration, a sense of hopelessness. Every month is another $1000 that disappears into the void. When you can’t, it’s a crushing existential threat that turns expenses like rent or food into credit card loans. At one point I live in a friend’s attic for a month so I can save up enough money to afford a security deposit.
I’ve passed through the worst of it. As of about a year ago, my income is significant enough that I no longer worry about covering my basic needs — as I did for many years. On top of that, I — for the first time in my life — feel comfortable spending money without checking my bank account right before I do. As of today, I have $1771.64 in my bank account and no unpaid bills (excluding student debt). It’s nothing to write home about, but that’s the highest it’s ever been after my big monthly expenses (rent/student loan payments), and I know I can’t possibly run out before my next paycheck.
On the other hand, I still have so much student debt that I don’t have a reasonable conception as to when I’ll ever not be in debt. At this point, I have paid ~$50k into my loans, and yet my debt monster is only around ~$15k below where I started, thanks to interest rates that surpass those on a home or auto loan.
My current net worth is -$70793.70, and I won’t pass through $0 until my late 30s. I am far from alone — or the worst case. I don’t suffer from the gender pay gap, for example. The median wealth of a black woman aged 36–49 is $5.
It’s put me in this weird limbo where I don’t really think about money in my daily spending and yet I still feel like I’m financially underwater.
I’m privileged to currently have a great job that pays well and covers my basic needs. But I’m still paralyzed by the thought of losing my job and being plunged back into the day-to-day uncertainty I lived in every day.
In the face of all of that, I’m not looking towards a nice car (or a car at all), or home ownership, or first-class flights to fancy vacations. To be perfectly honest, I’m not even sure what exactly it is the 1% (or the 20%) buys with their money.
It seems every month there’s a new industry that millennials are “killing”, whether it’s luxuries we ain’t got the time or money for (diamonds, napkins, golf), vacations (because if we take time off, how are we supposed to afford our avocado toast?), or Home Depot (because we can’t afford homes and avocado toast).
But let’s talk about one of those: vacation. Millennials in tech have been slammed for lack of work-life balance and for creating work environments that are hostile to parents (because they need to go home to their kids). But why do you think they’re working so many hours and yet still not spending money at traditional industries?
If you have to ask yourself why this is happening, you’re not paying attention. When a generation of people doesn’t feel economically secure enough to make basic purchases, industry will suffer.
With rising rents across the nation, housing is eating up more and more of the average paycheck. Add student loans to that and you end up with a generation with no disposable income, no savings, and no future. This is morally wrong.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ll take distant, crushing, looming debt over monetary anxiety *today*. But I’ve reached a point in my life where I don’t see hope so much as the inevitability of plodding forward one foot after another without an end in sight.
As Ta-Nehisi Coates said: “Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have. So you must wake up every morning knowing that no natural promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope.”
If the traditional American Dream is defined by potential for success, mine is defined by the avoidance of failure. I don’t see my life in terms of “success” vs “mediocrity”. I see only “security” and “insecurity”. I see the periods of my life when I was paying for food and rent with credit, when I was fearing running out of credit and being homeless or going without food. More than anything — I strive to avoid ever being in that situation again.
As long as that’s true of millennials, we’ll continue to “kill” luxury industries and continue to reject capitalism in record numbers, and we’ll continue to baffle the Democratic establishment in our enthused support for leftist politicians who promise decisive solutions to our problems.
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