27 Comments
Feb 26, 2021Liked by Anne Helen Petersen

I'm old, and my student loans -- crushing at the time, laughably small by current standards -- were paid off only because my mother died. My full backing for (1) full forgiveness and (2) requiring banks to offer no-interest loans as a condition of being permitted to do business comes from never wanting anyone ever again to feel the relief I felt and the terrible guilt that came with it.

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Feb 26, 2021Liked by Anne Helen Petersen

Thank you for reminding me every week why I subscribe. As someone with $70k in student loan debt, I have heard all of those arguments - and internalized them. This article feels like a kind of grace.

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Feb 26, 2021Liked by Anne Helen Petersen

Thank you for writing this. Tears are coming to my eyes from this. I just submitted my final Public Service Loan Forgiveness certification form for the remaining $20k in student loans. I'm hoping every day for an email letting me know it has been processed. :( maybe not so much.

This whole thing is absolute bullshit in so many ways. I get enraged anytime I see one of the mentioned anti-forgiveness talking points—just rage.

Driven by my parents' debt-crisis in childhood, I chose a career in understanding money so it wouldn't run my whole life. I became a successful CPA and am a CFO now. I learned all about finance, mainly it is BULLSHIT! That's what I learned. Well, I guess it did run my life either way. It was always was going to be that way.

Your book is amazing and really gives me a framework to truly communicate that collectivism is the only way. Just THANK YOU!

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Feb 26, 2021Liked by Anne Helen Petersen

In terms of looking for stories about the hollow middle class, some friends of mine in our narrow age group (born in the late 80s), have talked often about our feelings of invisibility and lifelong burnout even within the broader millennial generation. We were born when the Soviet Union died. 9/11 happened and the forever war began just as we were coming of age, our parents becoming indoctrinated in right-wing propaganda and losing their minds and their empathy when we needed it the most. And then, those of us "lucky" enough to go to college graduated into a recession that we've never really recovered from, having already been locked into loans that we took out years before, in the height of mid-aughts consumerism and naive as all hell. The major milestones of a middle-class life, for us, have all been marked by the crises that exposed the crumbling foundations beneath it. I guess it sounds a bit woe-is-me, and maybe isn't as universally felt across our little band as we think it is, but our entire lives we have been fed the endless lies of the American middle class, and called crazy, lazy, and entitled as we became buried under those lies. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Is this anything?

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Feb 26, 2021Liked by Anne Helen Petersen

A note on the 25-year forgiveness: if you have been on one of the income-based repayment plans for 25 years, when that debt is "forgiven", you have to count the amount that is "forgiven" as income on your taxes that year.  I borrowed ~$225k for undergrad and law school, at 8% interest, and have been on an income-based payment plan since I graduated.  But because I'm on an income-based plan, I don't even pay all of the interest that accrues every month, which means that at the end of 25 years the amount I would owe will have at least doubled and then I will have to pay taxes on my income + $500k of loan forgiveness. Instead of paying the Dept of Ed every month, I'll pay the IRS. It's usury.

That's why for the past six and a half years I've worked in state government, and I am diligently and very hopefully tracking and documenting my progress towards PSLF. But really I know the chances of getting PSLF are very slim. I joke to my friends that if PSLF doesn't happen, I'll move to another country and never come back, but it's not really a joke. Ten years after the end of law school and I now owe ~$350k.

My law school told me about the 25 year forgiveness, but not about the tax implications at the end of 25 years. Should I have been a savvier borrower, should I have not started law school a month before the 08 crash when thousands of lawyers were laid off and the starting salaries of people from my school dropped by more than 50%, should I have not relied so heavily on the information my school was giving me? Sure, probably. But only one of my parents finished high school, neither went to college, and neither did any of the other adults in my life except my teachers and professors - people who would know better than to give a student financial advice even if I had asked for it. So I forgive 18 and 22 year old me for the choices she made, knowing now that the game is rigged.

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This work is so deeply important, AHP. Thank you for your long-standing public thinking in an arena of such intense familial and individual pain. So many of the people I know burdened by student loan debt, myself included, practice workaholism as a ceaseless self-designed penance for the shame of their inescapable indebtedness. We look from the outside On Top Of It, but the hamster wheel inside (an internalized symptom of the very pathology that produced debt's imperative) is the rickety desperate truth. We can't stop making because we can't handle the hole we're in, dancing in front of the maw into which we'll eventually slip and be devoured.

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Feb 26, 2021Liked by Anne Helen Petersen

I'm really glad you mentioned the burden that college has also put on parents and extended families. I feel so much guilt for how much of a percentage my parents paid for undergrad for me (and then my dad died suddenly so my mom used life insurance money to pay the rest) because that is money they should have been putting towards their retirement. I did go to grad school and have only $2600 left to pay off nine years later, but that number would be more like $52600 if I didn't win the loser's lottery.

People ask if we are going to have a second child and I tell them there's no way I'd be able to pay for college for two kids. I don't know how I'm going to be able to afford it for one.

This madness needs to stop. We need full student loan forgiveness for everyone ASAP. No one else should have to go through repayment hell for another second. At minimum student loans need to be zero interest, but ideally undergrad would be free for everyone. Did people protest this much in the 20th century over 13 grades of school (K-12) being free? Why is an extra 4 years of free public education such a dealbreaker?

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Hamnet was one of the few books that stuck for me this year ... the characters hover around the corners of my mind like ghost friends.

The loan stuff is a deliberate, systemic transfer of wealth out of the younger generation and it makes me furious. Especially after going back to teaching for a couple of years and seeing how the universities have colluded. When there's a required class that's only offered every 2nd spring semester, and only seats 1/2 the people who need to take it, that's the university colluding with the loan industry to put students even deeper in debt.

I want them all wiped. Every last one. What would it cost? one fighter jet?

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Feb 26, 2021Liked by Anne Helen Petersen

I mean health insurance. I was on Medicaid for 8 months last year, and now that I have a job again, I have a medical issue to attend to, and the stress of making decisions and convos with my partner that we have about things so often. Ugh. All of this and I’m gonna pay $10k this year for it, more if things don’t go well. That feels huge, and I make good money!

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As someone who paid her student loans off 15 years after graduating, and only because my ex and I sold our house, so I had a chunk of money—otherwise I would have had to keep deferring—I am all for the complete erasure of student loan debt. Even if it weren't currently in my own self-interest.

[FOUR LONG PARAGRAPHS REDACTED...because I just realized this is the public edition of this newsletter, and I really don't want to splash myself all over the place where just anyone can read it...suffice it to say that I am a Parent Plus borrower.]

Oh, god, I'm writing a novel, but this newsletter and your Vox article got all my anxiety going. I'm not blaming you, AHP! Just...this strikes a chord.

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It’s not a viable way to address the problem, but I think a lot about the financial aid employees at my undergrad university, who would, once a year for five years, sit me down and be like “This is what you’re currently looking at to repay per month. This is what your monthly repayment will be if you borrow at this rate for the rest of your time here.” — a careful effort to give me the information I needed to MAKE those different choices. And even such a half-assed approach as that is a significant institutional effort, which I didn’t realize until my brother had no idea what he was getting into.

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My god, this. I’m one of the people who still haven’t gotten PILF despite having met all the requirements for years. And my loans are serviced by Navient. I now owe *more* than I did when I graduated from law school fifteen years ago. My husband is in the same position (also a lawyer working at a nonprofit). It’s delayed everything for me, from homeownership to parenthood - we are just embarking on both of those journeys now, at 40 - and the crushing financial insecurity plagued my 20s and most of my 30s. And I’m better off and more privileged than so many borrowers! So it’s hard not to have a really emotional reaction to how poorly this crisis is understood, and to the total lack of empathy people exhibit around this issue, especially in online discussions. It drives me absolutely bonkers!

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Hollowing Out Topic: Age 30s and 40s Student-Debted holding adults who spend their time jumping through paperwork hoops to keep their broke senior citizen parents in nursing homes costing $10,000/month if not on Medicaid.

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Just finished reading your Nashville bachelorette party article. I’ve lived in the Nashville Metro area since 1993 (I was 17), and used to go downtown for Predators games as much as 3-4 times a week during the season. Parking at the Methodist Publishing House, located off 8th Ave. since the late 19th century, was $4. Season tickets were relatively affordable and downtown, with the exception of the arena, had a few open bars and restaurants, but if you walked past Broadway, the offices and warehouses were shuttered. I started working in a downtown office in 2006, and didn’t start noticing the rapid change that you witnessed until my husband and I had our first child in 2013 and had to give up our season tickets. Now downtown at night is a place I’d never take my young kids, and we are house shopping but prices may drive us out of county and into an area we won’t fit in (we aren’t country people and my husband has a diverse background). The pandemic hasn’t slowed down the pace of growth; new high rise and hotels break ground monthly. The city is almost completely white, upper middle class, and full of people who bring money from elsewhere to a place where the cost of living is “lower.” Lower for them, maybe. For the rest of us, it’s higher and higher every day.

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Along with every other thing you do, thank you for reminding me to finally play Bonny Light Horseman all the way through. I kept hearing individual tracks on New Sounds and thinking, “I should deep dive on them.”

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I have lots of complicated and ambivalent feelings about student loan forgiveness, but those spoons are gorgeous and exactly a thing I have been looking for so that will be my contribution to this discussion.

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