In the United States, higher education is a loser’s game every single time. Student debt is massive and inescapable—the only debt that doesn’t care if you’re bankrupt, or old, or even dead. You could commit suicide and your cosigner, parents or partner will still be responsible for it.
It’s shocking just how normalized debt has become. My mother made the point over and over again while I was going through the agonizing process of acquiring my own loans.
“Everyone has to do it,” she’d say as I squinted at the undecipherable, sinister legalese that held the keys to both my future and my proverbial prison.
In 2013, Forbes reported an aggregate $1.3 trillion, with a T, in American student debt, and that number has only risen. Seven out of ten graduating seniors in 2013 had student loans, borrowing an average of $28,400 in federal and private loans.
That’s a 2 per cent rise from 2012, and debt is projected to keep rising. Even though interest rates were lowered, over 650,000 students who took out loans in 2011 defaulted by January 2013.
“I feel stuck.” My friend Rebecca Schlauch has over $30,000 in student loans, just a little over the national average for a four-year degree from a public university.
She’s making huge payments every month and is forced to keep her no-prospects job and live at home. After ranting and raving for a while, she laughs and virtually shrugs, dismissing it all: her future, her prospects, her mounting debt vanish into youthful optimism.
“College just feels like a total waste,” she says, and shrugs again.
Debt is so widespread that groups have formed to resist it.
Strike Debt is a group calling for “economic justice and democratic freedom” through the abolishment of all debts. Originally an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street, Strike Debt has created a number of debt-resisting affiliates across the country.
They operate as a non-profit 501(c)(4), “an organization whose primary activity is the promotion of social welfare.” Strike Debt and its affiliates buy debt for pennies on the dollar directly from public and private universities.
“Is this legal?” one might wonder. “Private organizations can trade in my debt?” Yes, they can.
“It is legal to trade in people’s misfortune. As part of the deregulation of the finance industry, the government made it legal to buy and sell charged-off debt,” Rolling Jubilee, an offshoot of Strike Debt, states in their FAQ.
Already, Rolling Jubilee has abolished $14,734,569.87 in different kinds of debt, mostly student, purchased entirely with money from donations. And this is just the beginning.
The goal is a jubilee for all, in which all debts are nullified. They want to emulate Iceland’s response to the 2008 financial crisis, when the country cancelled a percentage of mortgage debt instead of bailing out banks.
“Debts are just a promise which can—and should—be renegotiated or cancelled when the circumstances warrant. Strike Debt believes that now is the time for a jubilee for the 99 per cent,” their mandate explains.
“It worked in Biblical times and it can still work today.”