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.

The Massachusetts Educational Financing Authority, which secured more than $500 million in educational loans last year and services loans for 40,000 students, announced yesterday that it would not offer loans for the coming academic year. “It’s really the capital markets. It’s a global situation,” said Jessica Belt, a MEFA spokeswoman. In an e-mail to insidehighered.com, Kathryn Osmond, executive director of student financial services at Wellesley College, wrote “an economy that is in such a tailspin that it affects a critical agency like MEFA is an economy that scares me.”

The student-loan market everywhere began to face problems late last year, falling victim to the subprime mortgage crisis. Many lenders use auction-rate bonds and other long-term debt to underwrite student loans, the demand for which has been dried up due to a lack of investor interest. Since then, agencies like the one in Massachusetts have had problems refinancing their old auction-rate bonds, and they actually had to reverse themselves on private loans because the agency's bond insurer faced a possible credit-rating downgrade that would have increased the cost of floating new debt.

Rep. Steve Harrelson of Arkansas, writing about this development in his own blog, said that "in an effort to continue lending here in Arkansas, state fiscal officers agreed in April to stand in for skittish investors and loan the Arkansas Student Loan Authority $80 million."

Maybe all those Massachusetts students should consider relocating to Arkansas, where higher education is a higher priority.

A blogger called New Da Vinci lives there in Framingham, Massachusetts, and works in Watertown/Malden. He details the debt situation facing him and his wife Vanessa. Da Vinci began as a math major, intending to become a teacher. But he made a strategic move during college into a computer science major, thinking "if I could just handle it I would leave school and be rich." Financing his own college education hadn't been a problem, but Vanessa's story was different:

Through scholarships and a lot of help from my grandparents I was able to go to school and only have to pay for about $5000 of it myself. This put me far far ahead of most people I knew.
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Add to that the fact that as a Math/Computer science student my books each semester usually added up to about $500.  So I did it, I put everything on a credit card, and I got later got a student loan to pay it off.  I think I did this twice until I got a job that I could work around my schedule.  Once I had that I just started working 30 hours a week when taking classes and 50 hours a week when not taking classes to keep my head above water. All in all I racked up $20,000 in student loan debt, but it could have been much worst.  Twenty thousand is a very modest sum compared to the majority of recent graduates these days, and I don’t mind it at all.
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Sure there were a few trust fund babies and some athletic and scholastic scholarship students who were set in that regard, but most people were like Vanessa where every semester meant more loans.  Vanessa didn’t have help from anyone and, after 1 year at a private school, 2 years at a community college, and 3 years (including her masters) as a state school, she ended up with $35,000 of student loans–even though she worked 20, and in the summer 40, hours a week.

The switch in majors was a great choice for him, because he landed the "cushy job" he wanted and began collecting a nice salary, making "three times what I had ever made in a year." He signed up for a 0% credit card, set himself and Vanessa up in an apartment and began furnishing it. It was a dream-come-true. But they chafed at losing so much of their income value in rent, so they bought a house -- one that had been a foreclosure -- putting the down payment on his 0% credit card. "I’m making so much money, I shouldn’t have any trouble paying it off," he writes. "Great plan, if you pay it off.  Well, I was 2 days late on a payment a few weeks ago... so now I’m paying 9% interest on $7,000 on that card rather than the 0%. There goes the savings."

And, now he's a homeowner with the bills that come with home ownership.

Oil bills = holy crap,… there goes a couple thousand.  Excise tax on two new cars = holy crap… there goes a thousand.  Insurance on 2 new cars… there goes a hundred… a month.  Living in framingham, working in watertown/malden + gas and tolls… there goes 500… a month.  The fact that the house was a foreclosure, because that’s all we could afford, so it needed a ton of work… there goes a couple thousand.
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Well, here I am.  Doing much better than many people, but still very frustrated.  I have a house, a new car, a big TV, and yet all I do is stress about how I pay XXX dollars a month in interest toward the $40,000 I have in debt (not counting the cars or vanessa’s stuff, then we’d be well over 100K).

To manage his own college debt, a young teacher in Kansas has adopted a strategy that I've heard many, many teachers use: He's left the classroom and gone back to school. While he's taking classes for a masters degree, he can put on hold the repayment of his undergraduate debt.

My name is Todd R and I am a recent graduate of Emporia State University in Kansas. I received my degree in Elementary Education. Entering the teaching profession, I knew the pay would not allow me to live in a big house, drive fancy cars, or have fine dining experiences every night.

What I did expect was to be able to make enough money to support my family. A first year teacher in Kansas will make approximately $27,000 on average. That is not the best average but it looks very small once you start adding in all of my college loans. After graduating in May 2008, I have accumulated over $13,000 in debt. I would be paying back nearly $400 a month on college loans alone. Then I would need money to afford a healthy life and buy food, get gas to drive to school, my electric bill, water bill, and of course a roof over my head.

Since I have so much debt currently, I have decided to continue my schooling. I will be working as a graduate assistant and getting a tuition break. This also allows me to slowly repay my loans, which I would not have been able to afford otherwise.

Todd R also has a new daughter, he writes, and though her college education is 18 years away, he's already concerned that he won't be able to afford sending her college.

I think Todd R gives the right advice:

Please, make your voice heard and do not allow your elected officials to pass this off as just another issue. This is an issue that has a major impact on everybody.

Blogger Mike Leonard took a different course. Where Da Vinci found the job he wanted, and Todd R left the job he wanted in order to get a higher degree and hold off his debt for a little while, Leonard took employment he doesn't enjoy -- and is sticking with it -- because, he writes, it's "debt first, job second."

I often wonder why we bother.

Why not just jack it all in and go live on a small farm and become self sufficient? Then I could close my doors and my mind to the ‘real’ world and live happily ever. This is one of my little daydreams around the daily three o’clock slump. When my energy is sagging after lunch and just before I go for my ‘get me to 5:30’ coffee I seem to slip in to daydreaming mode. Physically I’m at work but mentally I’m a million miles away. It is in this daydreaming mode that I dream of upping sticks and heading to the country with my solar panels strapped to the roof of my car.

So why do I have these daydreams? It’s simply because I don’t like my job and I hate the fact that I have to stay in it to pay my debts. I use my daydreams as an escape from the pain of my job and my situation. I’m not alone in this. At any given point in my working day I can look around the office and see one of my colleagues with a thousand yard stare on their faces and I just know that in their mind they are on a beach somewhere.

So what keeps me and my colleagues in jobs that we don’t seem to like much? The simple answer is debt.

Leonard looks at this logically and has outlined a rationale for his choice. "Most people would rather languish in a job that they hate rather than risk disruption to their income by going after a dream or even just a better more challenging job," he writes. "I understand this completely as I am one of those people."

Consistency - If you have a debt repayment plan, any sort of debt repayment plan, then one of the key things you are going to need is consistency of income. The last thing that you need is for your income to be disrupted. Your plan is based on your current income levels. When you shift jobs you may increase your income but there may be a readjustment period depending on the dates of the pay in your old job versus your new job. This can be unsettling and may cause your debt repayment plan to go off kilter.

Change - No one likes change. Changing jobs is regarded as one of the more stressful life events. If you are already stressed enough by the weight of your debts then the last thing you need is additional stress of starting a new job and trying to bond with new work colleagues. In you current job the chances are there are people you like and people you don’t like but either way you know their moods and quirks and they know yours. While it may not create a perfectly harmonious work environment it does enable you to navigate work politics a lot easier than if you were the newbie.

Focus – If you know your job inside and out then you have a certain level of comfort with it. You generally know what to expect and when to expect it, you have daily routines and habits. This level of comfort with your job allows you to free up energy to focus on your debt repayment plan. That’s where you want to be – in a situation where you can focus on eliminating your debt. Not in the situation where you are anxious and worried about your new job and also worried about your debt. The chances are one of them will suffer as you try to give attention to both and from personal experience the one that will slip is your focus on your debt plan.

Taking this sterile, logical approach doesn't make him feel better about his work. In fact, his circumstances became "unbearable," he writes, and he "resented" his situation. "Eventually I realized that my attitude was working against me and moving me further away from my goal of paying off my debt. I set about slowly making amends by focusing on how my job allowed me to focus on paying off my debts."

Again adopting a logical tack, Leonard says he came to some conclusions: "I knew the job inside and out and I could practically do the work in my sleep. I realized what a huge benefit this was. After awhile I began to look on my job as an enabler – it allowed me to get paid a consistent income and focus on my debts without having the stress and worry of trying to prove myself in a new role."

Daniel Cuevas, a recent graduate of the City University of New York, isn't yet so circumspect as Leonard. Cuevas writes in his blog that he "majored in debt" during an 11-year journey to earn a bachelor's degree, dropping out three times and attending part-time -- while working -- during some semesters. He completed his degree in December, but writes, "All I really have to show for it is a shelf full of books I was unable to sell back to the college bookstore that I’ll never read, a dozen or so notebooks whose few remaining unused pages serve as a memo pad and a s***load of debt."

Throughout those years, he writes, he cut his living expenses down to less than $400 per month, used "credit cards as unemployment insurance while I looked for work," and found an unsympathetic job market in New York. He was overqualified for work in fast food chains, but was blocked from management jobs because they were reserved for those with fast-food experience. So he worked in retail. Meanwhile, his credit cards "went into collection" and his credit rating "took a turn for the worse." He took one student loan for $5,500 "to live on, a comparatively small sum compared to that of other college students."

His goal was to become a journalist and he sought journalism work while he attended classes. But, he says, "Without an undergrad degree, small neighborhood newspapers with shoestring budgets were the only publications willing to hire me, and even at that level I had to compete with recent college graduates for work."

"In some respects," he writes, "I do feel going to college greatly damaged me financially and probably did more harm than good to my journalism career."

Given the current situation that a college education no longer provides the financial security and job stability it once did, and that millions of students are graduating with unmanageably large amounts of debt, I wondered if more people weren’t asking themselves if going to college was worth it if you have to borrow money to do so. I Googled “is it worth it to go to college?”

There are millions of people like myself who grew up in low-income families, graduated from inner-city high schools and were sold the lie by parents, teachers and self-appointed “community leaders” that a college education is a surefire way to pull yourself out of poverty.

But if you graduate with so much outstanding debt that you may end up having less discretionary income than your peers who may have foregone college and entered the work force right after high school or had entered a trade school as opposed to traditional academia, was it really worth going to college? After all, the poorer your family is, the more you have to borrow. And when you can’t turn to family to help pay off your debt, you may end up putting off such things as getting married, starting a family, moving out of your parents’ home or even saving for your children’s’ college educations.

Poor people, and especially minorities, are constantly told as adolescents that education on its own is the key to success, no matter what the cost because the end justifies the means. But we soon find out that something as simple as not having a car or a certain license/certificate can keep you out of many jobs, regardless of academic credentials.

The truth is, what particular occupation or profession your major prepares you for and what internships you take on in that occupation or related field is what really determines how soon you will find steady work after graduation. Everything outside of your major (your general education requirements) is a great supplemental education, but does not help you become better at whatever it is you’re majoring in. If it did, it would be a required course in your major.

While not a complete picture of the college-debt stories across America, these four give us a sense of the landscape. In one way or another, all four are asking -- and answering for themselves -- a similar question: Given the circumstances in which we find ourselves in our pursuits of the "American dream," and finding little aid from the government that convinced us we could attain it, was the journey worth it? Todd R seems to think so, as he continues climbing toward it. Da Vinci and Mike Leonard are taking the pragmatic approach, measuring the labor of each week and month against the progress they make to pay down their debt. And whatever illusions Daniel Cuevas once held about the value of pursuing higher education to achieve the American dream have evaporated in New York City.

The stories speak for themselves.

I hope more readers will share their own.