Yes It’s True: Two local stories about student loans

There’s been some wailing and gnashing of teeth this past week about President Joe Biden’s decision to forgive a sizable portion of student debt.

People have been posting that they paid off their debts, so today’s students should do likewise. It’s a matter of responsibility. Yet many of the politicians who have cried foul themselves have had their debts in the payroll protection program (PPP) forgiven without much fanfare,

My greatest take on this is personal. When I attended college more than 50 years ago, I was able to score an Education Opportunity Grant (EOG), a National Defense Student Loan for my first three years and I paid for college in my senior year because I worked three summers as a painter’s assistant at the now defunct Ferguson-Droste-Ferguson Hospital in Grand Rapids and I received an inheritance from a long lost uncle.

I paid off my loans between 1971 and 1981. The sum was considerably less than figures I’ve been seeing in these modern times and the guaranteed interest rate was 3 percent.

You might say I was rather fortunate.

Not so the many college students these days who are saddled with much higher interest rates and much higher tuition and housing costs, pain inflicted by economic predators who take advantage of 18- and 19-year-olds desperate to get their higher education degrees. They are easy pickins’ for greedy lenders and too many of them spend too many years crushed by serious debt.

Retired Kalamazoo Gazette reporter Julie Mack allowed me to publish what happened to her in her collegiate experience and I’ll throw in a recent Facebook posting by Wayland High School graduate Kristen Goodwin Santee, my niece, who encountered a much more challenging economic situation not so long ago.

“…I paid my student loans off in January 2019… I’m ecstatic about this small bit of loan forgiveness that borrowers are getting. Here’s my story:

“I had about $12,000 total which largely came from my desire to study abroad and the decision to take out loans to fund what wasn’t covered by the scholarships and grants I had gotten to cover most of my other college experience (tuition, books, housing, meal plans, etc). I also worked at least one job throughout college, though I had two jobs starting in 2009 and I worked both jobs until I studied abroad my senior year (2011-2012). Prior to studying abroad, my parents took out Parent Plus loans to help me get funding for college and my mom spent a lot of time every year for each of us kids to apply for FAFSA to make sure we could get available funding.

“In high school I had applied for scholarships and grants because I was terrified of the expense of college. I had no concept of what that expense was like other than I knew that GVSU would be less expensive than U of M, which is why I didn’t even try to apply for U of M (where I had previously thought I would end up). We spent summer days at my Aunt Marcia’s house so my mom could work on the FAFSA application on my behalf. I had to go to the Henika Library in Wayland to apply for financial aid for study abroad because we didn’t have Internet access at home at the time.

“I want to pause here for a second to reiterate a couple of things: First, I had a parent who was willing to put in the work to secure as much funding as possible for school. FAFSA applications are frustrating and taxing and my mom made sure it happened.

“Second, my parents qualified for Parent Plus loans to help get me across the finish line, but they also had three kids go to college who all relied on those loans too.

“Third, we used the public library or family to access the Internet to apply for loan programs. All of this is to say that those are privileges that not everyone gets access to.

“After college, I worked full-time at a job I had gotten while still in school and I started making loan payments. I wasn’t putting any money away for savings and it was the first time in my life I felt like I had something like disposable income. I was also in a long-distance relationship with my soon-to-be-husband who did not have the ability to travel regularly so I paid for all of my travel and stays in NY.

“I briefly moved back in with my parents who charged me $100 a month to live at home and my mom told me to focus on paying the loans down.

“I was also planning for our wedding and financing whatever my parents would not be paying for since Mike (serving in the Army) didn’t have an income yet, so while I was making payments on my loans, I wasn’t making a ton of progress.

“During this time, I also got a car which my parents bought for me and gave me an interest-free loan on (so I had to pay it back but with no interest being charged like if I had gotten an actual car loan).

“After we got married, we moved in together in a tiny apartment in St. Robert, Mo., while Mike started his Army career there. We had basically no money saved but I still had my job (working remotely) and Mike was starting to get his officer salary. It was then that I was able to start knocking out my student loans.

“We were living on Mike’s salary quite easily so almost all my income could go toward my student loans. I had also sold my car so we only had one car – Mike’s – that he had purchased with his Cow Loan. We chose to live with one car for several years, which was sometimes a difficult sacrifice to make but we felt like a second car was a luxury we couldn’t afford.

“I continued making large lump payments to my loans and saw them ticking down each month. I even paid one of them off fully! I paid ahead so far that I let myself forget them for a period of time.

“During this period, I felt like I had achieved a little bit of freedom from that debt. We moved two more times across the country and decided to buy a house. Mike’s salary and housing allowance meant that we qualified for the mortgage without my income and luckily the only debt we had was my student loan pack and Mike’s Cow Loan. I was able to spend a couple of summers excavating an archaeological site in Italy because I saved up for it during the year.

“My sister also lived with us for a while and she and I worked at the same clinic so we car pooled to work in her car every day. That meant mornings where I slept in the car while she scrubbed in for an early surgery and I got ready in the customer bathroom a couple hours later or nights where she stayed late helping me prep paperwork for the front office to close out for the night.

“Eventually, we had to buy a new car because it was time to have two cars so we could both work outside the home and sister Katie had moved back to Michigan.

“In 2018, we had to move back to Missouri because the Army insisted. For moves, you have to front a lot of the costs but you will get reimbursed a few weeks later. We had no money saved, so when it came time to switch our rental’s utility setup to our name, they wouldn’t accept a credit card and we did not have the $350 to put down for the deposit, so we had to ask a family member for a loan to cover it. It was embarrassing and we felt it was time to really re-evaluate where our money was going because we couldn’t afford a $350 expense.

“We decided our goal was to be debt-free by the time son Ollie was born. That meant paying off the rest of my student loans (at this point I think it was around $5,000) and our credit card debt. Again, Mike’s salary and our housing allowance meant that my income could go almost completely to debt reduction.

“We didn’t quite hit our goal for paying off all of our debt before Ollie was born, but I was able to make my last student loan payment in January 2019 and he arrived in February of that year.

“My sister, Katie, asked me yesterday how I felt about student loan forgiveness considering I had already paid mine off and I answered as honestly as I could:

“I am ecstatic for everyone who gets to benefit from this. I don’t think it’s enough forgiveness, personally, but I definitely don’t feel slighted that I don’t get to have it. I don’t wish that I hadn’t paid my loans off already. For three years now, our family has had the privilege to make decisions without worrying about those loans. I would choose every day to have no loans because they’ve been gone for three years rather than still have to make payments years later while trying to juggle a family and a house and a pandemic.

“I have friends and family who have struggled under crushing loan debt for a decade or more, who have lived with the stress of the debt obligation and learned far too late that those loans would govern their lives for the foreseeable future. People who have put off having families or have taken jobs they hated, but that paid the bills, or haven’t had the opportunity to explore the world because of their loan debt. Sacrifice is not noble and it is not a virtue.

“My mom said to me today that she wished that I had gotten some benefit because I had paid my debt off early and I said that I can understand the sentiment, but I don’t feel that way. Not every policy is for every person. I pay for public transportation I don’t use, schools I don’t attend, for services I don’t need – and I did that even when I had the student loans! “Providing relief and services to people who need it is the purpose of government, even when it doesn’t apply to each individual in the society. All day, every day, I would always rather be the kind of person who looks for the good and the benefit than seek out whatever negatives I can squeeze out of the situation.

“I’m ecstatic about the loan forgiveness. This policy will have a measurable impact on millions of people around the country and I’m so glad for every person who gets to benefit from it!”