I'm going to graduate with a lot of debt.
What makes it worse is various media outlets keep going on about how the average student graduates with about $20,000 of debt. This is considered to be a travesty, and yet I chalked up almost that much in private loans my freshman year alone. So if I graduated with a mere $20,000 of debt in total, I'd be a happy camper. I don't need the media creating "awareness" about how difficult it's going to be for those poor souls who are $20,000 in debt because they're really just making me "aware" of how ridiculous paying off my much larger debt is going to be. Plus, think about my poor friend who goes to Northwestern: She's in even more debt than me, and she wants to be a journalist. Good lord.
Then again, I'm a sociology major. What fun we'll have together, living above our parents' garages.
The fact is, even with my huge loans, I struggled my first year of college because I didn't take things like books, clothes and entertainment into account. My friends seemed to be throwing money around, writing PostSecret cards that said, "My grandma sends me $200 a month . . . and I spend it all on weed." They would casually say things like, "Oh, my parents didn't want me to take out loans, so they're just paying for everything."
I actually transferred to this university so I wouldn't be paying private school tuition, only to find that on-campus housing is not an option and that off-campus rent is astronomical. So I'm pretty much paying the same amount, if not more, to go to an in-state school. I have accumulated this debt despite my parent's help, a scholarship and a part-time job, so I can only imagine how people independently paying for college eat, clothe themselves and pay for tuition and schoolbooks.
The most recent media revelation is that college students are using credit cards to pay for school expenses, with an average balance between $2,000 and $3000. In fact, it's such a problem, President Barack Obama recently signed into law a bill preventing people under 21 to be given a credit card without a co-signer or proof of income. This law essentially takes away our adult ability to pay 18.9 percent interest on rounds of tequila shots for everyone at the bar on our friend's twenty-first birthday. You know, the shots we'll still be paying off when we're 40.
I could talk about how there needs to be rent control in the College Park area, or how private loan companies need to be better regulated, or how there needs to be a crackdown on bank overdraft and late fees or more financial options for middle-class families. Really, though, I just want to commiserate with the students who have three or four times the "average" debt and say you're not alone. We're not alone, right? Right?
Bethany Wynn is a junior French and sociology major. She can be reached at bethanywynn@gmail.com.
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