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The True Impact of Student Debt
There should be a more comprehensive dialogue about the almost epidemic that debt has become for America, recent college graduates specifically.
After having graduated college 3 years ago (with a Master’s degree), have I noticed the true lack of a dialogue around the topic of student loans/debt. I think this may be due to the fact that we’re always given statistics about the amount of students that graduate with debt, and on average what is the debt that a student carries post-graduation, but we’re not told the stories behind these numbers. I don’t think anyone has really bothered to ask these individuals what their lives have been like after graduating. The statistics alone do not even begin to cover the true impact of what having this debt means for the future of said students, myself included.
I find myself to be very fortunate because even thought I had to incur student debt to finish my degrees, I was still awarded various scholarships that allowed me to borrow much less than what the majority of students do. Once I graduated with my Master’s (already having graduated with my Bachelor’s the year prior) I had a total of $60,000 that I owed to the Department of Education. However having incurred this ‘smaller’ amount of debt still had a large impact on my finances…
