In the late eighties and early nineties when I received acceptance letters to top tier law schools, I had a difficult decision to make. Do I go to the bottom tier state school for free. Or do I take on a mountain of student debt to get through one of the nations best. Anyway remember the late eighties? The economy was booming, mergers and acquisitions were explosive. The law school bragged that the median salary of its graduates in 1989 was $85,000. At the time, should a student fall on hard times, they could seek protections, as all businesses and consumers of other loans could, with bankruptcy protection.

I graduated from the top tier school in 93 amid a slow economy, and cut backs in the legal field. I could not get a job that might support my student loan payment of 800/month anywhere. My in-laws, two physicians, offered to support me in an effort to start my own independent practice, if we moved close by. Well to make a long story short, disease, death, depression, a local bust of a real estate bubble, and eventually divorce destroyed that effort. By then it was 1998 and bankruptcy protections was ripped away from the consumer by lobbying efforts by forces that eventually lead to the current student loan industry. As a result of compounding interest, lack of any meaningful consumer protection, un and under-employment for ten years, zero income for two years, and poverty level income from three, marginal income for the rest. I now have $300,000 in student debt at 53 with a two year old son. I am permanently insolvent and unless I can find a job doubling my salary in the next year or two, there is no way this interest will ever be paid in my life time. My result may be extreme, but there are many more just like me. Then there are the hundreds of thousands of lives that are marginalized, who completely give up, who are driven to the extremes of suicide. And we suffer from this because of lobbyists making up the existence of supposed legions of students that were trying to go to school and specifically get out of student debt via bankruptcy. I have never seen any legitimate evidence that this legion of American rip off artists ever existed, and no one ever names any.

Education is expensive because you have created a student loan system that destroys more than lives like mine; it destroys all of the free market forces that would lead to efficiency in higher education. College raises prices because they can, students can just borrow more money. And you absolutely have to have an education to get a job in this economy, so you really have no meaningful choice as a student. You are forced to agree to hocking all of your future for the slim chance that you will have a better future. Universities and colleges are turning hundreds of thousands of us into nothing more than indentured servants with little to no hope of ever having a viable economic solvency. It works because we are broke we have no way to have a voice in this political system that requires you to have millions to get the attention of policy makers, as the current stakeholders have. Further there has been a well orchestrated campaign by the industry stakeholders to characterize all defaulters as merely loser deadbeats trying to avoid their obligations. Well we are not, and given half a chance we would be buying new cars, houses and growing families, stimulating the economy and saving for our son’s and daughter’s education.

This is beyond punitive; if you made a person suffer this live long loss in a criminal proceeding I cannot imagine it would ever be called humane.

The problem is the availability of student loans and the lack of any cost of default being set against the school that takes in all the cash. I would like to see a return to bankruptcy protections, and that the cost of bankruptcy should be assessed against schools whose graduates are encouraged to take the loans, but are unable to get the lucrative jobs the degrees are suppose to generate. Thus, if the school does not see the prospective student as potentially employable, it will not take that student into its programs, and will only matriculate students it reasonably expects to be employable with the degree they are hawking. We need more accountability by the schools to the graduates. I could be a system where the school pays back the principal outstanding at the students bankruptcy. The school than holds a conditional potential lein that could be activated for principal only within seven years if the student has some windfall or unexpected recovery.

My student loans originated from my associate's degree in liberal arts; and, like the abovementioned person in the article, due to unemployment, underemployment, depression, etc...have not been able to acquire an undergrad degree as well as viable employment to pay the debt which has more than doubled.

I am willing to help in attempting to get the government to listen to the plight of the many like me who have chronic debt issues like these. And who have been working and cannot get out of the deep chasm of this debt.