Both my parents came to America with less than $20 and nothing else but what they wore. I constantly think of how hard they worked to let me live such a leisurely life.
You have to be pretty well off to begin with in order to be in a position to take out $250k of student debt.
It’s the kids who can’t even imagine going to college due to living in poverty growing up that are actually “less than dirt poor”. Someone who went to a fancy college enough to get that far into debt is going to be extremely privileged on average.
You do not at all need to be well off to take $250k in student debt. In fact, the worse off you are the easier it is to do so. It’s how the US federal student loan aide works, essentially. The less you have the more they’ll loan.
Friends who grew up in middle class to upper middle class suburbs and parenting all took on college debt to varying degrees and varying outcomes 20 years later.
Friends who grew up with me in the inner city around poverty and who grew up poor or worse didn’t even consider college as an option due to the costs.
Almost no one growing up in actual poverty is going to be considering taking on six figures of college debt. The concept itself is utterly foreign and absurd. You simply already know at a young age it’s out of reach short of a full ride (sports or academic) scholarship. Even if you wanted to, your family doesn’t have the luxury of waiting for you to graduate college before you contribute to helping care for parents or younger siblings. This fact is socially reinforced by both family and your peers.
The folks I know who ended up with massive life-ending crippling student debt all grew up insanely privileged compared to the average around me. They all pretended to grow up “lower middle class” but they are outright lying to themselves (and others) about it.
It’s been interesting watching the student debt forgiveness debate under this lense. I don’t think a certain class of people understands just how tone deaf they are on the subject.
Sure there are outliers, but I’m talking about generalizations here.
I mean maybe by being a poor person in college on federal student loans I ended up naturally around other poor people in college on federal student loans and it’s confirmation bias, but what you’re saying is a little too generalized for my lived experience. Lots and lots of people growing up in poverty take that FAFSA and run - it’s what everyone says is the only way out of poverty.
I’ll give you this, though: most of the poor college students I knew (myself included) never made it to the $250k line because we eventually had to drop out because things like having to work to afford food made it harder to do well enough to stay in school and graduate.
