A Graduate Student With $88,000 in Student Loans Speaks Out
On Saturday morning, a warm sun rose above Zuccotti Park as a throng of Occupy protestors with guitars, drums, tents, and signs burst out of winter hibernation to start a spring offensive that would land dozens in jail before nightfall. East of City Hall, a bulging line of people from all walks of life girdled the Spruce Street side of Pace University to register for the Left Forum, a yearly gathering that is the successor to the Socialist Scholars Conference. A few St. Patrick’s Day revelers, clad in kilts and shamrock-themed green, passed them by.
Across the East River, a 35-year-old Hunter College graduate student named Monica Johnson woke up with debt on her mind. She’s always thinking about student debt: the $88,000 she racked up between college and graduate school, and the legions of Americans whose unpaid student loans now total close to $1-trillion, twice the amount owed five years ago, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Student-loan debt now exceeds credit-card debt in the United States, with full-time undergraduates borrowing an average of $4,963 in 2010, according to the College Board.
Most students do not pay the full cost of college, but more and more are taking out loans. And if borrowers face severe financial problems, their student loans cannot be forgiven in bankruptcy, unlike most other forms of debt, such as gambling debts, that can. Some observers predict that student debt will be the country’s next big financial crisis.
Young people like Ms. Johnson, who are starting adult life deeper in debt than students a decade ago, see themselves as part of a new generation of serfdom. Even as their debt grows, she and others say that student activism around the issue is weaker in the United States than in other countries due to a psychology of shame and guilt.
For Ms. Johnson, the experience of student debt is not just a private affair. It is an “epidemic where lenders are like crack dealers who give young people a taste for signing financial contracts for funny money in exchange for their future labor,” she says. “The hope is that students become adult addicts who will never develop a connection with their personal financial and political autonomy.”
Ms. Johnson, who is pursing a Master of Fine Arts degree in integrated media arts, is working on a graphic novel, to appear online, about the student-debt crisis. Her protagonist, who is inspired by her own experience, is a college graduate named “Dorritt Little” who got a double degree in political science and journalism but can’t land a lucrative career. Her character finds herself serving tea and muffins at a cafe called “Stuckbar,” where she makes twelve bucks an hour and has no future. Dorritt Little ultimately decides to go to graduate school, thinking she’ll get a professional degree so she can be more competitive in the job market in which she wants to work. But then she finds herself in debt and questioning the value of her degree.
Ms. Johnson has also created a Web site as a discussion forum for debtors who can also learn about the different options they have for paying student loans. On Saturday, she was getting herself ready to present on a panel at the Left Forum about student debt.
Her goal as a “visual activist” is to combine her political cartoons with Web tools like wiki links and flash petitions to influence public opinion. She hopes that her political actions will help change the dominant discourse that says student debt is a personal moral failing to one that says it is a form of social control. “You only see it as indentured labor once you see that there is no way out of student debt,” she says.
Ms. Johnson is an activist, yes. But unlike some of the Left Forum’s more radical attendees, she doesn’t consider herself some kind of Marxist rabble-rouser. More than anything, she wants to show people what it’s like for young adults like her to live under the weight of modern-day debt.