Student Debt: Not Just For Losers

“I didn’t become a clerk right away because I had to work. I just had too much debt!…To this day it is one of the biggest regrets of my career.”

I walked into the Supreme Court building today for a Phi Beta Kappa event, expecting to hear Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor give some non-answer-answers about things I would care little about. Instead, I encountered one of the most powerful women in the United States opening up about a topic so very personal to millions of Americans: student debt.

Justice Sotomayor didn’t just talk about having debt, but how her debt almost prevented her from being the third female and first Latina supreme court justice in history. As an activist and advocate for student loan reform, I hear a lot of stories from a wide array of people. I hear about people who are putting off buying homes and starting families because of their debt load. I hear about people on the verge of being evicted because they can’t pay their rent because they had to choose to pay rent or pay Sallie Mae and the latter just seemed more threatening to them. I had never heard of someone so powerful and influential opening up about how their student debt has affected them so deeply, to the point that it could have changed the entire course of history.

Recently, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) announced to the world that she couldn’t understand why students are graduating with astronomical debt figures. She explained that working as a janitor helped her pay for college without taking on our any student loans. She said that she had “no tolerance for people who graduate with $200,000 or even $80,000 of debt because there’s no need for that.” Rep. Foxx failed to realize that the cost of college has increased, in some cases, nearly 1,000 percent since the 1960’s, making it virtually impossible for someone to pay for tuition on a janitor’s salary today. Source

I’d like to say to Rep. Foxx: you are absolutely right. There is no reason why millions of Americans are saddled with $1 trillion dollars of student loan debt. There is no reason why it costs upwards of $30,000 a year to attend small colleges in the middle of nowhere. There is no reason why students with nearly perfect GPA’s receive virtually no grants or scholarships even though they have been told their entire lives to work hard and college will be the next natural step. There is no reason why fat cats like Albert Lord are never late for tee time at their local country club while victims of his company’s predatory lending practices are told they must pay a fee of $50 per loan up to $150 if they can’t afford to make their monthly payment.

And there is most certainly no reason for someone as accomplished, educated and ambitious as Sonia Sotomayor to have had to make the choice to delay her career path in order to begin paying on her mountain of student debt. Student debt is not a new problem but it is most definitely one that is completely out of control and needs a solution now.

For more information on HR 4170, click here.

By: RaeAnn Roca
Founder, Loan Reform Now