When I was 16, my mom told me that she and my dad wouldn't be able to help me go to college. I knew very well there was no money to spare in our home, in the economically depressed rural South in the 1980s. I had a younger brother just getting to high school and two sisters still in elementary school. Both my parents worked, but in today's politically-correct language, we would be considered "working poor." Despite their long hours at a job that was decidedly low-skill, we got public assistance. And college was out of our league anyway; no one on either side of my family held a college degree. But from my earliest memories, my grandmother pushed me to do well in school, study hard, "get my lessons," and go to college. I did everything she told me to do, up to that conversation at the kitchen table with my mom when I was 16. Read More »
Maybe you've already heard about this: A 23-year-old Chicago bartender named Stephanie wanted to return to college for a biology degree but couldn't afford rent and tuition, even though she works two jobs. Stephanie's story illustrates a point I've been making for a few weeks now: One of the least-covered crises dragging down the nation's economy is the strain that college debt has placed on graduates and their families, and the obstacles that potential debt places in the paths of young people who want to earn college degrees. Read More »
I continue to scan blogs for personal stories of coping with college debt, and to scan the internet for mainstream coverage of this critical economic issue. Suffice to say, there's more of the former than the latter.
One of the commenters on yesterday's note pointed out that another Massachusetts agency had stopped writing college loans, and I found the story online. This decision takes another $500 million in education loans for 40,000 students off the table, leaving them to look for that much more from private lenders. Read More »
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