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First job? "Years later, I found myself confronted with a choice..." It wasn't his first job, it was a career you want him to give up. "Forty years after I t

First job? "Years later, I found myself confronted with a choice..." It wasn't his first job, it was a career you want him to give up. "Forty years after I took out my first student loan, and 30 years after getting my last, the Department of Education is still pursuing the unpaid balance. My mother, who co-signed some of the loans, is dead. The banks that made them have all gone under. I doubt that anyone can even find the promissory notes. The accrued interest, combined with the collection agencies’ opulent fees, is now several times the principal." Unless I'm reading this wrong, educational debt is still debilitating 40 years later. After a repayment plan of over a mortgage's worth of lifetime. But if he had a better attitude...

notacoward 11y ago
"It wasn't his first job, it was a career you want him to give up." Go read it again. That "years later" comes immediately after the part where he mentions transferring to a different school, and before he mentions working at The Wild Pair immediately after college. So yes, it was his first job and not a whole career as you supposed. "Unless I'm reading this wrong, educational debt is still debilitating 40 years later." 40 years is a long time. It's long enough to have had many opportunities, even as a writer, to stem the accrual and compounding of that debt. As I've said over and over, there are serious problems with our student-loan system. Those problems weren't nearly as bad 40 years ago, and they're only "debilitating" now because of continued poor decision-making well after the fact. Whining about an outcome that's largely, even if not entirely, under the author's control doesn't help to solve today's student-debt problems. Au contraire.