I am the 1% of student debt

Student debt is a near and dear issue to me, mainly because I have a ton of them. The New York Times posted an article the other day about people with more than 100K of student loan debt. It makes the case that this is a very rare case, and it may be (although the stats seem funny) but there are some of us. 

Here’s my story.  I’m sure many will comment on what I’ve done wrong here, but perhaps some will have similar stories. I currently have around $150K of student loan debt. 

Background

My parents were the some of the first people in each of their respective families to graduate from college. Education was always incredibly important in our family in what I always felt was a very positive way. I never in high school doubted if I would go to college. They had always indicated that we’d find some way to make it work. Yet we never could know what the future would really hold. 

My parents weren’t rich. In North Carolina they averaged around 55-60K salary combined, my mother working in early childhood education part time, and my father working as a manager of a printing supply company. We didn’t have a huge amount of college savings. Maybe 20K at most for my sister and I combined. But everyone was healthy, had jobs and life was good. We did not live beyond our means, have a big house or drive new cars. 

High School

The year is 2000. I’m in high school and just turning 18 years old. Thanks to an incredibly poor computer science teacher and a few IT internships and no mentors/role models, I thought technology wasn’t what I wanted to do for a career. I thought I didn’t want to reset passwords for a living. I considered graphic design and 3d animation but somehow was convinced out of going into that by a next door neighbor who was a graphic designer for the local newspaper. I had taken a few electronic music classes in high school and *loved* it. I took a class at the local community college and was having a blast recording friends in our garage. 

I unwisely gave myself the advice that, “everything that you hear recorded must have someone recording it professionally”, and felt that there would be careers associated with it. I tried to find out what the salary for an audio engineer or producer was. Numbers were all over the place and/or non-existant. I could find statistics for electrical engineers, but not audio engineers. The ones I could find seemed to indicate things were relatively positive (60-80k salary, some record producers making hundreds of tens to hundreds of thousands per record). Of course, none of these stats spoke to the huge un-reported population of amateur audio engineers who were willing to work for next to free for fun. Nor did they speak to the digital sea change of the recording industry, making so that everyone has Protools and a studio at home, and the whole decline of the record industry seemed a possibility but its impact not immediately evident to my 18 year old mind, filled with the passion of what I wanted to do. 

I asked around to find what the best place for audio engineering was. It seemed that Berklee College of Music was the answer. It looked expensive, but I kept being also told, “private universities have a lot more financial aid available than public ones” by councilors and teachers. I applied. I got in. 

College part 1

Yet, we didn’t quite know how we were going to pay for it still, and I needed a softer launch, so I attended University of North Carolina Greensboro 2001-2002 with the intention of transferring to Berklee the next year after knocking out some core subjects cheaply. I enjoyed UNCG and did fairly well in my classes. I took a graduate level electronic music class my second semester after the professor invited me to join (rather unusual of a freshman), which gave me access to the biggest recording studio in the school at all hours, plus their huge vintage modular synthesizers. 

Things go wrong

Around this time, things started going ‘wrong’. My father was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, multiple myeloma (likely from his exposure to Agent Orange during Vietnam).  My sister was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes around this time. Yet my father’s treatment was going fine and he had good insurance and a good job, although working quickly became hard. 

A few months later my father’s company is bought out/forced to close by Fuji who was buying many of the ‘middlemen’ out and closing them as to sell direct. Kiss that insurance goodbye. Here comes Cobra! My grandmother suffers a series of strokes and the outcome for her is looking grim. At some point in this my dog dies. 

College part 2

I go forward with my plans to transfer to Berklee. Honestly, I attribute much of my time there and many of my actions to being a coping mechanism. Moving to Boston was really hard for me, since my family wasn’t able to help me move there, help me find an apartment, etc. Yet, the 700 miles insulated me a bit from the horrors at home. 

Financially, we were barely able to do it. Berklee was not helpful at all with student loans or aid. There are very few scholarships at Berklee, and 99% of them are based solely on instrument aptitude. I wanted to pursue production/engineering and there wasn’t much for that. They maxed out my government loans, but those barely covered 15% of the tuition. The remainder they offerred private loans to cover. I honestly did not know the different at the time. I didn’t know that they weren’t dischargeable in bankruptcy (a change which occurred in 2005). I didn’t know how much money I’d make getting out of school. I didn’t know where the economy was heading. 

My father kept flipping through jobs, trying to find something that would stick. He would work, but honestly no one was going to hire someone in their 50’s undergoing cancer treatment and give them a decent wage. Real estate, security system sales, working for Terminex, etc. None of it really panned out that well. All the time his health was declining. 

Need-based aid didn’t really exist at Berklee it turns out. It was just a game of signing for more and more student loans each semester. After 1-2 semesters the outcome looked more bleak, but I didn’t really think quitting was an option. That seemed like it would waste all of the time, effort and money I had put in so far. The concept of being a “college dropout” seemed as bad as dropping out of high school to me. 

They calculated my financial aid generally based on income from prior years of my father’s income, which looked much higher than they actually were. They didn’t calculate insurance costs, skyrocketing medical bills, etc. 

My grandmother died. My father was getting sicker. I immature and a bit of an emotional wreck honestly. Whenever something threw me off, like the girlfriend I was living with breaking up with me, I’d invariably drop ever ball and start failing classes, even ones that essentially just required me showing up. 

Work

I had worked a great deal of the time at Berklee, yet living expenses in Boston were so high that it didn’t even make a dent. I don’t claim that I was great at managing money, but I do know that my rent for a room was generally higher than my parent’s mortgage. My parents also wanted me to focus on school instead of working. 

The majority of my working time was spent helping my friend get a recording studio off the ground. Nearly 10 years later it’s still in business whereas most Boston studios have closed, so we did something right. Yet, we never made much money and since he financed all of it, it really was his place. It gave me invaluable experience that really has set me ahead in so many ways though, so I’m glad I did it. Unfortunately, around 2004 we had a personal falling out and didn’t talk much for about 3 years. 

Post-Berklee

By the time that graduation rolled around in 2006, I had around $140K of student loans accrued. Yet, there were no job prospects immediately available. The record industry had fallen out, and studios were only hiring interns (and never with the intention of paying them). I moved home and got a retail job for $12/hr and deferred the student loans. My father’s health had seriously deteriorated at this time and he wasn’t able to work at all. Quite honestly it was a miracle that he lived that long and so well. My uncle died at the end of 2006 at the age of 57 unexpectedly, which was a real kick in the teeth for me since he was like a second father. 

The only fortunate thing about that was that I was able to move back to Boston with some small inheritance and got a job at a small Plone consulting firm where I did a bit of everything but programming. I pushed for a fulltime salary and did that for a year. I met some of the best people I’ve ever met in my life at Betahouse. These guys really became my brothers and I’m so thankful for them. Yet, I was only making around $35k/year, which wasn’t enough to pay my rent and student loan payments, so I kept deferring and kept accruing interest. 

I switched to a small gaming social network startup across the street called GamerDNA and was making a bit more money. Literally my first week on the job I get the call that my father died and thankfully they were highly understanding when I needed to take a few days off to attend to that. I was able to pay for my student loans, but just barely. Unfortunately, after about 6 months there they had to lay off a round of employees when they had problems raising funding, I was part of that layoff. I returned to deferring student loans, but it wasn’t easy. Sallie Mae would literally ask me questions like, “Do you have a car you could sell to pay the loans?” I didn’t have a car. 

Today

Thankfully at the end of it I got a job at a startup that I’ve had for almost 3 years now and I’m able to pay my loans in full. Yet, its still a LOT. Payments are around $1400/month. 

I don’t ask for sympathy, just an understanding that people who accrue a large amount of student loans aren’t intentionally trying to do that. I made mistakes, yes, but I don’t think I could have done it any differently really in retrospect. I made the best decisions I could at the time, given my knowledge, maturity and emotional state at the time. 

I feel that Berklee did fuck me in not providing enough need-based aid and not being clear about career wage statistics for entering students. I clearly needed aid and I requested multiple times for better data but they wouldn’t give clear numbers. With how much they pushed private loans on people there, it would almost seem as if they were in bed with Sallie Mae. 

Sallie Mae and all of the banks that pushed changes so that bankruptcy couldn’t happen for student loans are just greedy and really shouldn’t be allowed to offer these loans. Greece and big banks get bailouts and yet students are left out to dry by the same banks. 

TL;DR- I was young, had lots of shitty stuff happen, went to a private school, wasn’t given any need based aid, had few career options afterward and now I have a huge amount of student debt but I’m making it happen.