This week, Al Jazeera published my latest, “The case for no candidate like Biden ever again.”
In it, I discussed the 36-year-long process of decision-making and 240 payments worth more than $67,000 on the $41,300 I originally borrowed between July 1987 and January 1997 to cover my expenses as I completed my BA and MA in History (with minors in Mathematics and Black Studies) at the University of Pittsburgh and my PhD at Carnegie Mellon.
I went over the links between the debt I had to accumulate as a first-gen Black student and then Sen. Joe Biden’s (D-DE) work to make student loans, and not need-based aid, the centerpiece on-ramp for students without the financial means to pay for college outright in the 1980s and 1990s.
I embarrassed myself by talking about the moments I had to choose between jobs, to pay or not pay bills, to declare bankruptcy or other measures, either in order to pay down this debt or despite needing the money I would spend on this debt for other purposes. I couldn’t even discharge my loans through the bankruptcy I declared on my consumer debt in 2011, thanks for Biden’s bipartisan deal with Dubya and the GOP back in 2005.
It took the pandemic and the recession that came with it to create the opportunity that would lead to the forgiveness of my remaining student loan debt (about $100,000 in accumulated interest, all based on interest rates locked into starting with my first loan borrowed in 1987, when I was 17, and the consolidation of those loans under Sallie Mae in 1997, at a rate of eight percent). Even then, because Navient (née Sallie Mae) as a private loan servicing provider owned my debt, I continued paying on my loans throughout 2020, 2021, and well into 2022, when the government started buying back such loans.
Now that the Biden Administration is doing something to help some folks with their debt, they deserve credit for acting where Congress and the courts have refused to act. But that in no way negates the role Biden played in creating this nearly $2-trillion problem in the first place. One cannot be a savior when all they are really doing is cleaning up the mess they helped make.
Why is any of this relevant here? Because part of the Confessions From an Educated Fool story is the need to eat, pay rent, pay down debt, pay for daycare, pay a car note, and have meaningful yet high-enough-paying jobs to afford a lifestyle quite different from the massive poverty I lived with and in while growing up and well into my 20s. To understand the sometimes difficult and meandering and terrible decisions I made about the kinds of jobs I took and the jobs I turned down, folks must get this. The burden of student loan debt can weigh heavy, like a railroad car full of lead bricks, so heavy even Superman has to brace himself before lifting it up. One can be a Marxist (not me) or an anti-capitalism (definitely me) all they want. But until the systems that make legalized greed (which is what capitalism is) flourish are done away, the heavy weight of debt plays a larger role in career trajectories and career decisions than most of us even contemplate.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the piece. Tell me what you think. Thank you kindly!