Editor’s note: This commentary is by Al Salzman, of Fairfield, who is a retired public school art teacher and an active painter.
[W]e have a new “lost generation.” The previous Lost Generation, the generation after World War I chronicled by F. Scott Fitzgerald, were the young who had become disillusioned by the brutality of the war, and subsequently by the Great Depression, and the loss of their sense of hope for the future. The new lost generation are the millions of young folk who are weighted down by student debt, which has swelled to $1.4 trillion, surpassing credit card debt.
You might say that these students are in debtors’ prison — perhaps not behind bars — but bound nevertheless by the chains of anxiety and distress while apprehensively anticipating the next phone call or threatening letter from their profiteering creditors. Hard as they might try to meet their debt obligations these graduates are caught in an untenable situation where the hopeful promise of a well-paying job after graduation has failed to materialize. And the jobs that are available, because of wage stagnation over the last 40 years, do not afford the graduate the income to both live and pay off their loan.
Seventy percent of college students graduate with crushing debt. Interest rates as high as 6.8 percent create a snowball effect that leads to more than one in four borrowers being delinquent or in default. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and 136 of her colleagues have introduced the Students Emergency Loan Refinancing Act in the Senate and the House, but true to form, the Republicans, in the pocket of the bankers, have filibustered against it.
It is clear that the student debt crisis is getting worse with no signs of slowing down. It is a crisis that threatens our economy and the future of young people all across America.
The average student debt is close to $40,000 with many upwards of $75,000. A significant number are over $100,000. States attorneys general in recent years have targeted student loan agencies with lawsuits that accuse companies of engaging in illegal and deceptive tactics. That these for-profit agencies have ethics problems should come as no surprise to anyone who remembers the 2008 mortgage scam, which led to the Great Recession, requiring a taxpayer bailout for the crooked banks.
Of course the root cause of the crisis is the unconscionable explosion of tuition in both public and private colleges. Schools like UVM pay for top-heavy administration by boosting tuition, while an increasing number of front-line faculty are adjuncts, many of whom barely make ends meet. The result is an echo of the egregious wealth disparity, which has created a society of the haves and the have-nots, the infamous 1 percent and the rest of us. We are supposed to be “the exceptional” society. Then how is it that Germany and Slovenia — yes! Slovenia — have eliminated all university tuition, not only for citizens, but for foreign students as well.
Here in Vermont I would suggest that anyone with an oppressive student loan burden, contact the Attorney General’s Office and Sen. Bernie Sanders to learn if there is a possibility of restructuring your loan payments.
