Student Debt Essay

With college being a social norm and being looked at as the path or key to success, many who walk down that path, face financial nightmares. Most students face the struggles of paying for tuition, text books, food, housing, commute, etc. For this reason, a lot of students have no choice but to take out student loans in order to continue their studies and get a college degree, in hopes for a better future. To get a sense of how many people are struggling financially due to student loans and debt, the United States has an accumulated total of approximately, 1.4 trillion dollars in student loan debt. The vast amount of student debt has created many barriers in many people’s lives, which is why the government should make it easier for individuals

to get loan forgiveness.
Student debt is nearly impossible for most graduates to pay back completely, and it continues to rise due to interest rates.

According to Jessica Dickler from CNBC, numerous college graduates are suffering from extreme stress due to their student debt and many are prevented from starting new chapters of their lives. Not only are student loan borrowers hindered from purchasing luxuries, such as a new car or a house, but they are also hindered from marriage or having children. Graduates are not the only one affected by student loan debt, those who decided to go to college and take out loans then dropped out, are affected from debt too. Earlier this month, the U.S. News reported that there are 3.9 million college dropouts who are undergoing student debt. Most in fact, went to for-profit colleges before they dropped out. Many would think that dropping out of college would also drop any student debt one had, but unfortunately, that’s not the

case.
For some people, these debt could last a lifetime. Most compelling evidence, Zach Carter from Huffington Post, mentioned a study that found that many elderly Americans are actually becoming poorer as they continue to repay their student loan debt. When working, people take parts of their paycheck and save it for retirement, via Social Security. As mentioned by Carter, the Government Accountability Office report shows that some of the elderly who still student debt to pay off, have no choice but to take out their retirement money to continue to be able to repay the government back. In other words, by the time the elderly retire, they would have little to no money left to live off of.
Given these points, I came to the belief that the government should make it easier for people to get loan forgiveness.

In the United States, there are only a few ways to get loan forgiveness, including: becoming a teacher, joining the military, getting a government job, death, etc. Getting loan forgiveness is not easy. How many people in the working world come out of college and choose one of those professions? Not many. Becoming a teacher may sound like an easy way out of student loan debt, but think again. According to Emily Atteberry from USA TODAY, the only way out of student loan debt when becoming a teacher is getting a low-income teaching job for at least five years straight. In brief, student loan debt could last a lifetime because people generally don’t get loan forgiveness until after

death.
People go to college in hopes for a better future, because in our society today, it is hard to find a good paying job without a need for a college degree. Without a good paying job, how could one possibly achieve their desires of owning a home, marrying their significant other, having children, and much more? Unfortunately, there are many people who don’t come straight out of college and live the ‘good life’ that they have been imagining for as long as one can remember. It is obvious that people take out loans in college because they are not capable of affording all the costs of college, and that fact most likely still stays the same after college. With that being said, debt is not the only thing that graduates and college dropouts face, they also have to deal with the barriers created by such debt. Important to realize, individuals are not the only ones at stake because of college debt, but so is our economy; which is why I believe that more individuals should be able to get loan forgiveness. Some are more at stake than others, but generally, we are all at stake.