IDR

Income-drive repayment--as I recall, initiated under President Bush with bipartisan support, and improved under President Obama--remains legal and an opportunity to pay less per month on government-backed student loans.

college affordability and creative writing

"The college affordability dream is dead for these students" notes that the median debtor now owes $29,400 and includes this section relevant to the teaching of creative writing:

Lucy Parks, 18, enrolled at New York University in 2012 armed with a $60,000 college fund — the fruit of decades worth of her parents’ diligent saving — and a $30,000 annual scholarship from the school itself.

NYU is one of the most expensive universities in the country, running more than $60,000 a year for a full-time student, including room and board. After applying her scholarship money, she still had to pay $30,000 a year for tuition, room and board. For Parks, who wanted to take advantage of the school’s unique creative writing program, NYU was her first and only choice.

“I didn’t want to sacrifice my dream simply because I may not have enough money,” she says. To make ends meet, Parks worked three part-time jobs and eventually moved into an apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn with two friends to save money on housing."

“There were some unpleasant periods when I wasn’t working and I would run out of money and I wouldn’t eat,” she says. “Another issue is that when you have to work 20-plus hours a week, your schoolwork takes a major hit. So does your social life."

When her college funds dried up in sophomore year, she went to the school’s financial aid office for help. She left with $2,000 in grants and advice to take out more loans. Rather than take on more debt, Parks, who has a 3.75 GPA, decided to drop out. It was a decision she didn't make lightly, and she says she may enroll at a more affordable college sometime in the future. In September, she’ll move with a friend to Atlanta and try to find part-time work until something more permanent comes along.

“That kind of debt severely limits the amount of things I could do with my life,” she says. “I want to continue educating myself, but I don’t want to pay $60,000 a year for it.”

When I was 18, I ditched my math/comp-sci leanings soon after high school graduation, and more than anything I wanted to read Western classics. So early in college, I ignored my father's advice about choosing a more vocational track and read widely from the traditional European canon. After my two-year MA with a 9K stipend, I didn't listen again when he told me if I wanted to get anywhere teaching college I would have to get a PhD (he had one semester of a PhD program under his belt although for years I thought he was ABD and even proudly used that expression as a teenager). Instead I drifted into adjunct work, embraced it, in fact, because I greatly enjoyed teaching, and I could continue to pay back my student loans and support myself in modest fashion and not have to return to car sales after taking a meagerly paid vacation (the stipend) from harder work. I still support myself in a modest fashion although sometimes I get a chuckle thinking about what some of my students would think of the primary residence I rent or the 12-year-old vehicle I drive (which could easily be a 20-year-old car had that one not unfortunately been rear-ended last summer).

Anyway, lives take all kinds of twists and turns, so it's hard to say what will happen to Lucy Parks, but I hope her involvement with N.Y.U. (well regarded as one of America's leaders in academic capitalism both home and abroad) does not prove catastrophic to her life's finances or long-term plans. It sounds like this particular young writer made the smart move of leaving, and I only wish she had recognized before she enrolled that there are enthusiastic, conscientious instructors teaching creative writing at almost every state school in the country (typically, you can get in-state tuition after a full year of state residence) as well as private universities offering better financial aid. 

Affordable college should be a national priority, but only some of our politicians seem aware of this.

If any young writers reading this would like advice on writing, submitting, publishing, or trying to survive in a world where it often appears as if the game is rigged against them, find me online and drop me a line. I'll answer for free.

student loans

It's that time of year, and both SEIU's Adjunct Action and The New York Times have information on student loans that could be of use. My understanding is that if you've already accrued the loans, then some income-based relief, or even forgiveness, is most possible if the money was lent after 2007 and if your loans were from the federal government.

income-based repayment for student loans

At the SEIU conference in Washington D.C. last November, one student group reported that they are fighting to make income-based repayment the default setting for government student loans. That would certainly help millions of students, and potential students, who are probably unaware that such a program exists. For more information and to see if you are eligible, follow this link.

mean or median?

Perhaps we need a law that regulates journalists to the point where they are obliged to use either mean or median, instead of the ambiguous "average" when reporting on student-debt statistics. Although "average" most commonly refers to the mean, it can also be used as a substitute for median (middle number) or even mode (greatest number).

Anyway, this article, from the paper of supreme truth that we as good Americans ought to genuflect afore regularly, is interesting and certainly shows how including the for-profits greatly increases the debt load as well as the percentage of students with loans.

The student-debt average, which I'm presuming is a mean, appears to be in the 26 to 30K range, and I'm also presuming that outliers on the high end could mean that the median is a bit lower than that.

Excluding for-profit schools, the institute reported that 68 percent of graduates had student debt, averaging $27,850; a recent report by the College Board, using different methodology, put those figures at 60 percent and $26,500.

But for all of us fighting for greater and more equitable access to higher education, as any reasonable educator in a democracy would be, we should also consider that many of the students bringing that number down (taking less money in loans) are concurrently working more hours than they should be so as to avoid leaving college with outlandish debts.

The most troubling aspect of the article is that when including the for-profits, in the past four years, the average debt has grown by almost $6,000:

The Institute for College Access and Success estimated that of the students who earned bachelor’s degrees in the United States in 2011-12, 71 percent had student loans, and the average borrower had $29,400 in debt, compared with 68 percent and $23,450 four years earlier.

With such great increases, making debt-to-income repayment the default option for all borrowers seems to be one  way we can help college serve as a genuine "opportunity" for the greatest number of students.

student debt under the lights

General Electric (CNBC) takes time out from lighting the world to swoop in late and sell advertising off the student-loan bubble. When I watched, I saw race (three white people with white-collar jobs in a report on a black family with significant intergenerational student-loan debt), and I thought that it would be disingenuous not to share that aspect of it with you. The show's anchor, like our President, is the perfectly middling-hued gent Melville waxed utopian about in the middle of Moby Dick, so no doubt, despite the segment's visual rhetoric of a race-to-obligation correlation, we are rowing toward a greater America than ever before. Or, at least increasing our collective debt. . . on your oars, ladies and gents!

student loan debt and net-worth gap by race

There's another study that shows how the gap in net worth grew by race in America; whereas a previous study demonstrated that African Americans own about a nickel for every dollar whites have secured in Roth IRAs, houses, cars, or collectible baseball cards, this one focuses on families and has the net-worth gap rising to $236,500 in 2009. Here's a paragraph from The Washington Post's article on the study:

Despite that progress, the wealth gap between whites and blacks nearly tripled among study participants, going from $85,000 per family in 1985 to $236,500 in 2009. Overall, the median net worth of whites in the study was $265,000 in 2009, compared with $28,500 for blacks. A broader survey done by federal officials has found even larger disparities, with blacks having a nickel of wealth for every dollar of wealth owned by the median white family.

Although the article focuses on how real estate and employment opportunities, or lack thereof, have exacerbated this discrepancy, we should also consider that student loans have played a role as well. On the one hand, the one with the positive digits attached to it, so to speak, many more African Americans have been able to attend and graduate from undergrad and graduate schools over the same time period, and it should be recognized that this is largely a positive outcome of making college more "accessible" to everyone.

On the other hand, and yes, I'm not ambidextrous but you've come to expect to hear from this sad soggy fish, because African Americans arrive on campus from disproportionately poorer backgrounds, they are much less likely to be getting help from family and much more likely to require financial assistance to go to college. Despite any "advantage" they may have at the financial aid office, it's almost undoubtedly the case that African Americans are taking on more debt, particularly if we look at debt-to-degree ratio (compare debt by race at equal levels of attainment and not compare, for example, the debt of a white law-school student to a black undergrad).

If you look at the total picture, not just the loan debt of graduates, but all who attend as well as all who fail to graduate, and then include the community colleges and for-profits, you will see a clear picture of how "higher education" as currently practiced in America unfortunately fails to ameliorate the black-white wealth gap and in fact contributes to the widening difference.

(And, yes, I understand how this could seem anomalous, or unlikely, from a reader's perspective if the reader is a white student from financial hardship or supposed American middle-class "affluence," who has been burdened by student-loan debt, while the reader has noticed a black student from similar circumstance, or even wealthier circumstances, come to receive better grant aid from a specific college and even the much cherished fellowship or "free ride.")

Overall, these are my strong suspicions, of course, and not something I've had to time to "study" or write a peer-reviewed article on. As it happens, I was mostly too busy teaching school.

*In 2017, I've seen student debt for an undergraduate degree cited as above $37,000 for an "average"--what I assume to be a mean--and around $31,000 for median debt. Various articles suggest 70% of college graduates hold debt; it's harder to find exact information on debt held by students who do not complete the degree.

free debt and no pay

Default: The Student Loan Documentary posted a 26-minute version on youtube last week, and the uses and abuses of unpaid internships continue to get notice in the mainstream press.

those were the days

Here's a good follow-up blog to a recent New York Times piece on paying one's way through college. The author of the original article is also the author of this blog, and he notes that many readers accused him of glamorizing paying for college on one's own without realizing how unrealistic this is in 2013.

One of the first commenters from the blog notes with enthusiasm just how out of touch our political leaders may be, even if they serve on our national committees on education:

The national conversation is completely uninformed and unrealistic. Colleges sit on the sidelines tut-tutting while legislators (esp. GOP) shake their heads at the spendthrifts who borrow way too much for college and then go home to live with their parents. Rep. Foxx, a key member of the education committee in the House, boasts about having "paid her way" through UNC in the 1960s when it cost $1,000 for room, board, and tuition.

April 21 (poorest county)

Philadelphia is the poorest county in Pennsylvania and the only major metro area aside from Baltimore (if we count Baltimore as such) to appear in this slide show of poorest counties in each state. Congratulations! In fact, our leadership in poverty does help maintain the reasonable pricing of rents and restaurants, at least compared to other cities.

Maybe along the lines of "the city that loves you back," we could have something like, "the poverty that sleeps on your park bench," or "poverty with a smile," or "Philadelphia: bringing poverty to the twenty-first century."

I'm hoping I have a few more liveable years before I slide back into our leading indicator. I'm hoping for a few more years of teeth, too, because there's nothing quite like poverty with a blue solution in a glass for the dentures while one's food is being mangled and made mushy by one's gums.

And then, reminded of my own slim margins, I chance upon this poor lost soul debating the merits of a BMW purchase and kitchen remodeling and felt all was right with the world.

All was right for all of us who aren't even close to Rex Pickett as far as fame and experience and luck and talent and connections and Hollywood credentials go. Okay. "Right" may be a strong word, but we were persisting. We were still alive. We were. Weren't we? Rex was wronged, though, and that seems to be one point of this article that indicates he's come to see big publishing as no more of an ally to literary fiction than Jeff Bezos. I hear your "duh," but still enjoyed reading his screed. And for Sideways, I certainly enjoyed both the film and the book.

Meanwhile, President Obama does what so many big media entities do as well. That's cater to the next generation of consumers, voters, etc. with a nifty election-year student-loan pitch (while to the best of my knowledge remaining mute on the question of what these colleges that students should go into debt for are paying the teachers that the students will meet on the inside). Hey, maybe Trident could have gotten Rex that nice book deal if he'd agreed to name it Sideways Youngbloods, and instead of beautiful scenes with middle-aged gripers and philanderers swishing and spitting merlot and cabernet he added a bunch of nine year olds dropping their weekly allowances on fruit-punch pouches at the local conveniencery?

And even as I'm writing this stuff, I'm thinking to myself that I should be writing.

Fight for Your Long Subsistence in a Lower Middle Quintile!

And have a good weekend.