It's not every day that I feel the suffocating threat of student loans looming over me. The anxiety and worry that accompanies my student debt comes and goes, like a sickness.
Today I feel it, and I know I can't be alone. I am one of thousands of graduates that finished college this Spring with weary eyes turned to the future.
But what does the future hold for graduates like me?
There are no real immediate job opportunities for students of applied linguistics here in the states, especially when the largest focus of my degree was the application of applied linguistics to teaching English as a foreign language.
I, however, chose my degree because of my love for language - not for teaching. I also have a partner here in the states that I am not too keen on abandoning in order to go teach abroad.
So what is left?
Administrative/clerical work? I did that all through college. Why not now?
Retail? I did that through high school.
Food industry?
...
Are these the things that my expensive-ass degree prepared me for?
Am I being spoiled when I say that I don't want to do those things? That I don't want to struggle and grovel just to pay back a debt that should be a right? I want to do something I love and that isn't laced with the desire to commit suicide.
I want to enjoy this one, single life that I get - not to be worked to death in this busy little empire of ants.
I have seen article after article about how student loan debt is a burden on the economy - about how the student loan market is going to crash.
I have seen my future in these articles - student loan default highest among 40-somethings.
So this is my desperate plea to the internet:
Occupy student debt!
Forgive student loan debt!
Reform the public education system!
Education is a right, not a privilege! Help make it universal.
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