Logan Ramsey
Editor-in-Chief
When we talk about the student debt crisis, we often talk about the underhanded ways loan borrowers make paying our loans harder than necessary after college, but there’s a facet of the crisis that goes largely unaddressed. The students who are attending college now and are the future of the crisis.
As you’re attending college, you don’t necessarily need to worry about your student loans. As long as all your tuition is covered by scholarships and loans, and you keep filing your FAFSA every year, your college will be covered until you graduate.
Once you graduate, however, the taxman comes around to collect and you may not be in the best position to start handing over money.
If you’re anything like me, your college years have been spent living paycheck to paycheck, trying your best to find a decent meal that isn’t McDonald’s for the thousandth time. Bills have taken over your expenses and you’re left wondering how you’re supposed to eat while you have rent to pay, textbooks that you can’t afford to buy and homework that’s piling up.
Time becomes a commodity once you start college. Between your classes, your part-time job and possibly your other part-time job, you have to find the time to keep your health up, do all of your homework and find time for what you enjoy.
Time for enjoyment can be cut from the schedule, at the expense of your mental state. As you slip away more and more into your schoolwork, you’re left wondering if it was always this hard for college students.
I would contend that it was never this hard for college students before us. When I’ve talked to adults who have professional jobs now and have paid off their student loans, they’re shocked that some of us have to pay loans comparable in amount to a car loan.
Studies have shown that college students today are more stressed than previous students. The American Psychological Association found a 30% rise in students seeking appointments at counseling centers between 2009–10 and 2014–15.
61% of those students report anxiety, 45% reported stress and 28% reported academic issues, among other personal issues.
The good thing to find from these numbers is that more students are seeking help for stress, but as I said earlier, time is a commodity. When you take time out of your schedule for counseling, you have to trade it for time you may spend on homework.
Everything you do comes with a trade-off of time, and at a certain point you have to wonder if we’re being overworked.
This problem doesn’t affect us the same way that it may affect students at more expensive universities. Some people have over $100,000 of money they owe for student debt, and I’ll never have that much debt from Idaho State University.
The people at those schools have more debt than we do and they may have to work part-time jobs just to stay afloat as well. The issues that I’m talking about don’t just affect ISU, it’s the entire country.
College tuition is rising all over the United States. We reported in the Bengal that from 1987 to 1988 the average cost of tuition for a public, four year school was $3,190 after the figure was adjusted for inflation, and in 2017 it rose to $9,970.
The part of this that’s hardest for me to swallow is that Ivy-league schools send students home with the least amount of debt, which sounds like a good thing until you realize it’s because they don’t take many poor students. Harvard economist Raj Chetty found in 2017 that the top 1%, families who make more than $630,000 a year, are 77 times more likely to get into an ivy league school than students from families who make less than $30,000 a year.
The student debt crisis is affecting the poor and middle class alike, and current students have to wonder what does their future hold? What happens when they get out of school and have to pay their tuition, for which their degree may not have prepared them to pay.
This affects future students too. They’re coming into college with higher tuition to pay which may only rise in the future.
The only way to address this crisis for future students is for the government to take it into their hands and start subsidizing college tuition to account for the rising cost.
This only solves one part of the problem though, because current students and graduates have been left out to dry. I don’t know how to solve this crisis, which is why the people who are smarter than me have to, for all of our sake.
