OCCUPY STUDENT DEBT

Dear Rob,

I read this email and immediately decided against the prospect of speaking up. However, for some reason I didn’t remove it from my inbox. My story is not one that concerns any extreme of rich or poor. The more I thought about this the more I realized my story is exactly what other students may want to hear. It may be what they need to hear. Where to begin?
I was raised in a perfectly middle-class family. My mother, who is primarily my sole supporter, is a philosophy professor at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania. I even went to a rather well off all-girls international boarding school for most of my high school. When I graduated, college was not an option; it was the next step. This all seemed natural to me, but in retrospect I was incredibly lucky. I have always had insurance. I have always had someone to fall back on. I would have even had free tuition at Bloomsburg University, but it was a very small university and after living away from home since 15 I felt that I needed more. I went to Indiana University of Pennsylvania and still received half off of the tuition, that wasn’t more than 20,000 a year to begin with. This was about a $11,000 a year for me and seemed (and still is) cheap in comparison to other colleges I was accepted to like the CUNY schools or UMass. This is why I took out some FASFA loans and didn’t even think about it. Luckily my mom paid for everything else like food and housing; I barely even worked during school because I hadn’t been raised to think that I needed to. As I write this I realize how snobby it all sounds, but this was not the case. My mom is a professor, she knows how hard classes can be and wanted me to have every opportunity to do my best. We accept the working college student as a standard, when really this could not be farther from the case.
In the end I graduated with two degrees. One in journalism and one in political science. I did this in five years. I did so with honors and a shining resume, but this resume wasn’t cheap. I have two liberal art degrees, which means I NEEDED internships and study abroad credits. I did all of this. I had an internship at the World Wildlife Fund headquarters in D.C. I attended Georgetown University that same summer and earned credits. I studied abroad in Australia and gained a better understanding of their laws, especially in the field concerned with aboriginal rights. I joined Habitat for Humanities and helped rebuild after Hurricane Katrina. I have all of this and more, but not for nothing. My mom paid for every summer excursion (really it was a necessity for my degree) which meant she had less to fork over when it came to everything else college required. Finally I graduated with what I thought would be a pretty clean slate. I checked my student loans and was shocked. This sounds strange but in the last two years FASFA gave me more money than I needed. I never asked for it and they never notified me, but because my grades were so good, several extra thousand dollars were sent to my school. This is money that I now have to pay back. My degrees are useless right now. I wanted to go into graduate school but knew I would be putting myself into the kind of debt I couldn’t sleep at night knowing about.
It would be a lie to say South Korea was my only choice, because maybe it wasn’t. I knew I had 3 months to start repaying my loans. I knew my degree (either of them) was not in demand and the longer I looked around the more time I was wasting. I was accepted as a teacher in Korea with a high enough salary to start paying it all back. My mom still helps me some and if I ever needed it she would help me more. I plan to go into graduate school for international relations and this whole experience probably looks good on my resume in the long run. I may not be the happiest person, but I am not struggling. In fact I have never gone without. However so many people feel that the only way they are allowed to blame the US government is if they are suffering in unimaginable ways. I could say more about my own story to justify why I am angry; we all could. However, my story is still one that should have gotten more. My interest rates should be lower. My time before repayment should have been longer. My field should have more jobs in it. God forbid I didn’t have at least one person to rely on or it would have all been a lot scarier. This is my story. One that seems so normal to people and even to myself. As regular is it may be it is still one plagued with serious injustice and looked over by a country that no longer cares. I can only imagine what other people have to say.

Best,

Carley