The media spends a lot of time covering the rising price of energy, the rising price of food, the home-foreclosure crisis and the federal bailout of Wall Street heavyweights, all of which are massive strains on our economy. So it's appropriate that the media covers them.

But I suggest there's another crisis that needs just as much coverage: The specter of unsurmountable debt is preventing a lot of our high school graduates from going to college, and the loan debt that college students are collecting today is an uncalculated drain on our economy over the next decade or more, since those graduates can't or don't make other life choices until they resolve that debt.


It took me nine years to pay off my own college debt in the 1990s, which is why I couldn't buy a house until my thirties. During those nine years, I watched friends of mine make choices I could not. Almost all of them bought and updated cars when they wanted to, many of them married and started their families, some bought homes (or built homes, or even bought vacation homes, too), and they all took vacations to places I've never been, from Orlando and Key West to Cozumel and Cancun. I appreciated seeing the pictures when we caught up several times a year, and I enjoyed my dinners with them, hearing their stories.

Of course, I enjoyed (and still enjoy) my friends and am happy that they could make their choices. Really. For the whole nine years I spent paying off my loans, I didn't wish I had had their parents (and their good finances), but I did wish that my parents had had the same good fortune. As it was, my parents earned too much for me to qualify for some federal aid, but they sure didn't earn enough to pay my college tuition. This, to me, became the definition of being "middle-class" -- stuck in the middle between hoping to do what you want someday and not being able to do it now. The only option left for me was loans, and my financial aid offices were always helpful when it came to filling out those loan applications. I was a guaranteed source of income.

I started my career as a teacher, and I enjoyed that. I'd had great teachers and although my parents hadn't gotten formal higher education, they stressed education when I was a kid, so I was lucky that way. I grew up wanting to be a teacher and I achieved that goal. The downside of being a teacher is earning a teacher's salary, though. Let's just say that a single teacher with several thousands of dollars' worth of college debt, steadily accruing interest, doesn't have a lot of disposable income. I could tell you a lot about Chinese food, though. And I learned a long time ago that if you're an early bird at Burger King on Sunday morning, you can collect a ton of coupons from the complimentary Sunday papers there without having to buy the paper. I signed up for the savings cards at the three grocery stores in my town, and I paid attention to which days of the month were double-coupon days there.

I'm not a teacher anymore but it still stings me when I hear people question teachers' complaints about low salaries. Surely you've heard the same things said: Why should teachers complain? Their work days end at 3:30, they get great Christmas holidays and they get summers off. Without getting into the long response I developed during my teaching years, I (and most teachers) would gladly have had those skeptics share our schedules, responsibilities and regulations for a semester or two, at the same rate of pay. In my case, as in the cases of a lot of my co-workers, I had not one but two part-time jobs through the year to augment my teacher pay, even through that great Christmas holiday, and through all eight, then seven, then six weeks of my great summers off. Upside of doing landscaping work in the summer: I got to be outdoors. Downside: I had to schedule night-time recertification courses throughout during the school year instead of knocking them out in a week during the summer.

And this was in the nineties, when things were good! Over the course of my career, I've come into contact with a whole different class of friends -- though I still see and keep up with my college buddies, too -- who also started their families in their twenties and are now dealing with kids going off to college. Based on what I hear from them, things are worse now for people who were in my position twenty years ago. I know horror stories about parents taking out their own loans, getting second mortgages, postponing their retirements by a decade and more. Many, many of them prove my definition of being middle-class: Stuck between hoping to do what you want someday and not being able to do it now. Seeing what debt did to their lives, they're trying to head off their kids' debt at the pass.

What they describe is, to me, a hole in the ground. To make progress, they dig deeper, ever hopeful that a miracle will come.

I'm not talking about what media calls the "credit crunch." I never got a credit card, and a lot of these parents have managed their credit cards well. I'm talking just about the slow strangulation of these kids' economic prospects.

I don't have a solution to offer, only the diagnosis of a problem that the mainstream media hasn't caught on its radar yet, or isn't giving much attention yet anyway. And this seemed as good a place as any to express myself.

Is this a familiar situation to anyone else?