Chained to Student Debt to Be Financially Independent | War is Peace

It's hard to believe that in a month my first year of college will be behind me.  Last Summer, I left the  banking job I had had for almost three years to pursue the life of a non-traditional student.  Things weren't going well in my position as the Retail Loan Processor there.  The job was high stress, management was at a stage where it kept changing hands and the boss that was assigned to me knew little more about my job than my original boss.  My first boss, who's authority at the bank was treacherously phased out over time, had made the position at the bank much more human, much more livable.

The difference between the first woman who oversaw my work and the second is that my original boss was a kind, personable woman that was confident enough in her position to defer to the Vice President I worked with on a daily basis.  When she was in doubt regarding as to which processes were most efficient to complete our work we shared an element of trust that always allowed us to over come challenges as they arose.  My new boss knew almost nothing about the documentation that I spent about eighty percent of my time producing.  However, unlike the management prior, she still felt confident and validated in usurping and impeding that process.  Once the other two processors at the bank caught onto her disregard (or indifference at best) to the experience of myself and the Vice President, a woman who had been at the bank for twenty years, it was all over.  My work life went from stressful to untenable in a matter of months.

It wasn't just the end of my time at the bank that had got me thinking about my future as a pencil pusher.  I am the creative sort and my primary passion has always been writing, self-expression and I guess, essentially, that means art.  I'm fascinated by the human experience, although what that even means is open to interpretation.  I myself couldn't tell you exactly what I mean.  The entire thing is a process.  Right?

My adult life had been in tumult since before it began.  I was a young woman that emerged from my at seventeen.  As a rattled victim of long-term child abuse with post-traumatic stress disorder I became an emancipated minor and entered the work force.  Although I would have graduated from High School one semester later I opted to get my general education diploma (GED) and start working right away.  At that point I already had an apartment of my own and bills to pay.  Granted, my communication skills weren't the greatest at this point.  I had lived the majority of my life in deference and terror towards authority figures.  I had a hard time vocalizing the fact my homework was being neglected because I was working full-time and going to class.  When I was granted with the choice to end up on the streets and cling desperately to a High School diploma I chose a different manner of survival instead.

Things evened out very gradually over handfuls of years.  I worked my way up from fast food to accounting.  Somehow, in my early twenties, I landed a job in the Investor Accounting department of a Goldman Sachs subsidiary during the housing crash.  I filed mortgage insurance claims upon foreclosure.  This was during the economic crisis when the housing bubble popped so business was booming.  As foreclosures abounded and the housing market devoured itself my company began to implode.  In hindsight, this was inevitable.  However, as a young twenty something I remember being good at filing claims but unsure of what the long term implications of my work were.  I began to slowly become aware of the way corporate America alienated it's workers by compartmentalizing their responsibilities.

In some ways it was no different from where I started out as a "sandwich artist" at Subway.  When someone ordered a sandwich we would scurry to the production line and one person would cut the bread and place the meat and cheese on it before passing it down to the vegetable person and finally to condiments and the cashier.  Subway had found it was more efficient and sanitary to pass the sandwich along to compose it instead of employees cycling down the line back and forth from one sandwich  and customer to the next.  The end product for the Subway customer was a delicious sandwich.  At the mortgage servicing company I was only part of the long assembly line of people that would touch a subprime loan that had ultimately gone into default.

I spent my days pouring over the history of loans from their festive origination.  I would comb through pictures of home appraisals after the living space had been abandoned.  We found everything from hoards of name brand clothing to dead cats and dogs that had been relegated to their fate like dusty Nikes or television sets.  My job was to prove we had done everything we could to keep the person in their home.  I scoured our system call logs and story after story unfolded of people ill with cancer, dying or just impoverished.  Their homes were slipping from their hands and I was making sure we composed a story that painted us at their side, as their advocate.  I allocated fees, specified the process of bankruptcy and checked the periods each state allowed (or didn't) for the borrower to potentially repossess their home.  It always struck me, those terms, borrower, investor, processor.  No one had a face, we were all letters and numbers relegated to equations.

I had to report the adjusting rates of the mortgages too.  I would read the interest rate histories, cringing, as I watched the rates jettison sometimes from eight percent interest to sixteen.  These loans were high risk but the borrower was approved anyway with a pat on the back, a handshake and what they thought was the embodiment of the American Dream handed over in the form of a mortgage. The homeowner would try feebly to feed the monster consuming their income.  The foreclosure would always inevitably come after the rate increased month by month or year by year.  Subtly, each finger was pried away from the little piece of paper that represented the purported ownership of property and a home.

In the end, if I had done my job, the claim would be paid to some varying degree and the investor would be reimbursed for their legal troubles and for their investment.  Somehow, the borrower would still end up owing a plethora of fees and debts.  The investor took back the property to market it once more and the process would start again when the mortgage changed hands.  When I started with the loan servicing company I had originally been expected to file four claims daily.  After three years that number had doubled and then tripled.  At one point I was so crushed under my workload that I smiled to myself, left my cubicle and vacated the ten story building that was a hive of mortgaging intricacies and modern business.  A day later I returned at the request of my supervisors and started again.  The files on my desk were inches thick.  Several a day.  Did each one represent the upheaval of a life?  Of a family?  Probably.

Some days protesters rallied outside of the building.  Some of us gathered at the windows and stared down from a view stories up within our hive at ACORN and their enraged members.  I was just a broke kid in my early twenties trying to rise above the stigma of child abuse.  I was just doing my job.  A company wide e-mail was sent out by the CEO that day vehemently admonishing us for going to the windows to peer out at the company's adversaries.  It was unprofessional supposedly.  I read the electronic letter and smirked at the idea of trying to control a ten story building full of working, tax paying adults as though they were children that should be quelled of their inherent curiosity.  I was beginning to despise big business.

When the government bailed out the car companies and banks that had torn the economy apart I was outraged.  I would have rather lost my job and been bailed out as an individual.  The reasoning given, of course, was that unemployment would have skyrocketed.  Yet, as an employee of the toppling industry I welcomed the demise of my employer.  I had seen an ugly side of the work force.  One that dehumanized not only its employers but the consumers it relied upon to survive.  I wanted it to end.  Ultimately, it ended anyway.  The mortgage servicing company I worked for is no more.  It liquidated all of the subprime mortgages in its portfolio and ceased to be.  They outsourced all of our jobs to India.  I slipped out the door towards the end as they started sending my co-workers to India to train our replacements.  That's when I made up my mind to go back to school as soon as I could.

As soon as I could turned out to be later than I thought.  The first time I tried to go back to college I enrolled at a community college in Houston, Texas.  Although I lived five minutes from the school, miraculously, I wasn't zoned as a resident which meant I had to pay double to attend.  There was a vote that would have zoned my neighborhood into the system but the wealthy neighborhood of plantation homes and mansions across the freeway rallied against it in opposition to the few dollars it would increase their taxes each year.  Their children were going to private institutions and they had no desire to contribute to perceived education handouts to those of that lived near the industrial parks and mostly Hispanic neighborhoods.  I was furious, but unable to come up with an alternative, I went to the school willing to pay double.  It wasn't meant to be.  I attended for a month and was making A's before I was dropped from my classes after the financial aid office failed to process my government loans properly.  The infrastructure there was terrible and losing my ability to go to school was a disaster.

I went to live on my aunt's futon.  Then, chasing a long-distance relationship that would ultimately fail, I ended up in the Midwest.  Once again I ended up working for the banking industry.  Another three years went by before the opportunity to go back to school opened in earnest.  Now, as I've said, I'm about to complete my first year of college at the University of Wisconsin.  I'd like to say that it's equivocally been the best decision of my life and I'm assured of the next step in my journey and ultimately my career.

But you can already guess what I'm going to say, can't you?  With the coming election the cost of college education is being criticized.  It's playing a rather large role in campaigning.  After this first year alone, I already have over ten thousand dollars of shiny new debt in my life.  For consideration, my vehicle was ten thousand dollars when I bought it.  On my banking salary it took me six years to pay it off.  As I face celebrating the completion of my first year of college there's a debate waging in my head over well... wages.

I am coming into a college with quite a different life experience from the rest of my peers.  Honestly, I adore college life.  There are many departments devoted to helping you succeed.  You can get healthcare for your mental or physical state.  I love pouring over the works of brilliant thinkers and scientists.  Do I feel like my worldview has broadened?  Do I feel more intelligent?  Absolutement.  I'm learning another language.  I feel my writing has improved.  I'm creating more content than ever.  I feel inspired.  I suppose the question is can you put a price on something like that?

Teachers will tell you no and they're absolutely right.  Can you put a price on love or the human experience?  I'd say no.  Yet, at the end of the day we all need to get paid for our efforts and services in order to survive.  So should I, like the parents that opposed the college zoning refuse to contribute to society because I for instance, have no children?  Should education only be socialized up to grade twelve?  If education is really so important than why aren't we more heavily invested in it as a society and a community?  I'm not just talking about academia either.  Where are the socialized vocational schools or courses in High School preparing us for more than structural obeisance?  If credit is going to rule someones ability to get a job or a home why aren't we talking about it and teaching our youths how to balance a checkbook?  As a banker and now a non-traditional college student I have many questions about the state of our educational system but that could be another topic entirely.

What it really comes down to ultimately is that my education is going to cost me approximately fifty thousand for a four year degree.  If I come out of college making relatively the same wage I did as a respectable desk jokey it stands to reason that if it takes me six years to pay off ten grand I could be paying for my education for at least the next thirty years.  This is to say nothing about pursuing a graduate degree or doctorate.

As a thirty year old woman looking to education to become more financially self-sufficient in pursuit of a career in earnest, I ask you, what sense does it make to pursue a debt that could strangle and enslave me until retirement or beyond?  Has my chance to learn and grow in this society through the pursuit of education already come and gone?  And it is it fair for a student, new to the world, to enter into our workforce and society with this kind of debt already shackling their feet or collaring their throats?

What's more terrifying yet is this.  Last year or so, when I paid my taxes apparently the state of Wisconsin overcompensated me in my refund due to no fault of my own.  They demanded back a few hundred dollars.  At the time my vehicle wasn't paid off and so I was living paycheck to paycheck.  Their solution was to deduct this money in two installments directly from my pay.  If I hadn't had the help of a close friend I would have been unable to make rent.  I would have potentially faced homelessness on the whim of an errant government.  The government took my wage and I had no say.  I was helpless.

When you take out government loans as I have had to do in order to pursue my education the reality is that once you are done pursuing your education (be it indefinitely or because of graduation) the government can begin garnishing your wages.  Which means, if you are in debt to the government you are potentially enslaved by them.  You are potentially taking a pay cut for thirty years because you wanted to become an educated member of society.  So it seems to me, if you're going to college, you better be damn sure you're coming out the other side with the ability to nab a job that will pay you a wage to live and then some.  Otherwise the wage increase you can expect from a degree will be long-term neutralized by the purchase of the degree at best.  Worst case scenario you'll be so far in debt you won't be self-sustainable at all.

That begs the question though, what about all of the students working as baristas and retail cashiers?  How are they going to pay back their debts to the government?  Do they not deserve to pursue their education even if they can't immediately turn it into a viable position at the desk of some corporation with a ten story building?  It isn't as black and white as all of that.  I would argue we need artists and free thinkers in our society more than ever.  Simultaneously, the biggest conservative advocates of reducing the government's footprint on our lives will diminish free education as a handout and allow the governments exploitation of our nations students as they attempt to avert poverty.

Regardless, as I ponder my next year of college this debate occurring inside of me is as real as it is valid  not just for me but for students all across this country.  Is this worth it?  Is this ethical?  What point does the pursuit of self-sufficiency serve if you become shackled to banks and the government or the very society you're attempting to change, perhaps, even before you enter it?

As I look over my loan statements I am reminded of my days, tucked into a cubicle watching the interest rates of home borrowers soar from their grasps.  I think back to my days of High School as I considered how to survive and educate myself.  I still have medical bills from those uninsured days at eighteen that haunt my abysmal credit score to these days, well into my late twenties.

I'm reminded of learning about feudal societies built on class structures, indentured servitude and slavery.  I was taught for the longest time that these archaic methods were outdated, cruel and as I was fortunate to grow up in a land of liberty where the pursuit of happiness is sacred and freedom is guaranteed.  Yet, as my debts close in around me for maintaining my education and health I can't help but wonder if feudalism hasn't migrated across time and sea to wear the guise of capitalist democracy.  What's worse is I wonder where we would be headed if I had never been able to learn those cautionary tales of history at all.

The freedom we are consuming to this day is a watered down version of the concept.  It does a disservice to the very word.  Capitalism has robbed us of our right to health, to education and our mobility within our society and the world.  Corrupt politicians have aided this process over time like a bartender topping off the bottles of vodka with water.  We have been fed for so long a substitute for what we seek that one concentrated of drop of true independence feels intoxication and we are told that that feeling, in and of itself is a privilege that comes with a price tag instead of unalienable right.

Some day soon, students will have to find a way to educate their selves and protest the educational system and requisites for jobs without feeding a toxic infrastructure.  One day soon we will have to find a way to progress the human race without letting our intellectualism and skills feed those who would broker our bodies, time, abilities and desires.  By playing on a board clearly tilted to our disadvantage we some how concede that the game is fair and that the victory of our oppressors is valid.  We already have to trade our bodies for coins in order to maintain our bodies and the bodies of our children.  We pay insurance intermediaries to survive.  The only thing I can think of that is as equally tragic and disgusting as putting a monetary cost on one's body is stamping a price tag on the human experience and the dimensions of the mind.