Late one night, as I was putting my son to bed, I got an email notification on my phone from FedLoan, the federal student debt servicer. The message told me that action was required on my part, that I had received a secure message through its platform. I tried to log in through the app, but I got an error message saying that the service was available only to users with debt balances. This was strange, because the last time I checked, I owed tens of thousands of dollars in student debt. I’ve been making regular monthly payments for 14 years; I expected to be paying on it for 20 more.
I don’t regret my education, or what I had to pay to get it. I grew up on a farm in a rural community and put myself through community college, and then through public state university by working at Walmart, selling steaks door-to-door, and for a few semesters, working as a stripper. No matter how many part-time jobs I pieced together, I never earned quite enough to cover the bills and my tuition, so I took out student loans.
My parents weren’t rich and never talked to me about money or amortization schedules or compounding interest—and I’m not sure their advice would have been very good even if they did. They believed, as I do, in education and that an education has value beyond the economic opportunity it might provide. For me, the value of education meant I could walk away from the kind of work I had to do with my body and toward the kind I could do with my mind.
