Day by day, the student debt bubble continues to grow. More and more college debt is added to the pile, while loan distributors are making huge money off of the interest accrued on those loans. Just ask Joseph Chanlatte’s story from Forbes. Hailing from Haiti, he moved with his family to Brooklyn, New York with his family in the 1980s, and had to figure out how to pay for college all on his own.
The article is worth a read through, because similar to Joseph, students across the nation are struggling to pay for student loan debt, especially states that have refused to pass pay equity legislation that would allow DREAMers or undocumented citizens, from receiving in-state tuition rates and financial aid access that their high school peers who are applying to college would be able to obtain. Joseph took out the maximum federal loan: $64,000 but in his senior year, he had to take out another loan, a private loan, of $10,000 in 2007.
Federal Loans vs. Private Loans
The difference between federal loans and private loans is night and day, and rarely is the distinction between the two ever explained, especially not from the private loaner. Joseph called the private loan, his “financial prison” because the terms on these types of loans were so oppressive: “The interest on Chanlatte’s $10,000 loan ballooned so much that, at one point, the balance was $19,000.”
Leaving college unemployed, Joseph deferred his payments being unable to pay them in full, and his student debt worsened by the month: “During that time, they did these capitalized interests that they kept adding onto the loan,” he said — $5,816.29 from March 5, 2009 to November 10, 2009. After he complained to the Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the interest rate, which at one point hit 16.3%, suddenly became a fixed rate of 12.25%.”
To not be told about such interest rates and then be expected to graduate to make enough income to support yourself and potentially your family too is beyond outrageous. We need a better system of financial aid so that we don’t have situations like Joseph’s where you are indebted to the loan agency for decades after you graduate.
It Should Not Be This Hard
Even today as a software engineer making $68,000 per year, he still continues to pay off his college loans. Years after graduating college, still forced into a vicious cycle of paying off student loan debt is what is building the student debt bubble. As colleges raise tuition, they collectively are calling for the student debt bubble to burst, making more and more students unable to pay for their tuition.
We need to expand access to education. Free community and public college education needs to ensure that it will be able to effectively manage increases in education quality, and increase access to education. If we can manage both goals simultaneously, I hope that more high school students and adults will attend college and that barriers to education will be reduced. Far too many people of color, people from low-income communities, and other disenfranchised voices have been left out of the education system. It is time that we changed that. Students need an education system that works for students. We do not have anything like that.
