Help me: I’m poor

So it’s finally June. The end is nigh. Lots of people are graduating and getting ready to leave school forever, or continue on with grad school, or jobs, or travel…you get the point. But let’s face the facts: When we go, we’ve got six months to prepare for a lifetime of paying off our student loans.

So it’s finally June. The end is nigh. Lots of people are graduating and getting ready to leave school forever, or continue on with grad school, or jobs, or travel…you get the point. But let’s face the facts: When we go, we’ve got six months to prepare for a lifetime of paying off our student loans.

We all knew what we got ourselves into.

When I was a wee child, the thought of leaving my parents’ house for this weird thing called “college” seemed like such a foreign concept to me. Now, here I am, three years into my bachelor’s degree. This time next year I’ll walk through commencement, receive an expensive piece of paper and have a degree in English.

The stark reality is that I’ll be saddled with the task of paying back my student loans. Which brings me to the point: What about those who are too poor to pay for college?

Lucky for us we’ve got financial aid. It comes in many forms: scholarships, grants, fellowships—and the dreaded loan. Financial aid is provided to students whose estimated family contribution falls into a certain bracket or brackets.

Every year, after we fill out our FAFSA applications, our chosen school will tell us how much aid we can expect to receive for the following academic year. You might get grants from the state, or subsidized and unsubsidized government loans.

Subsidized means the federal government pays the interest while you’re in school, leaving you responsible for the principle amount, and unsubsidized means that you’re responsible for the interest plus the principle, which leaves you with a higher amount to pay back post-grad.

Whichever you get, though, it’s still a loan.

Last year The New York Times published an article on the subject of being too poor for college. The Times stated that education is playing a larger role in “preserving class divisions” than we give it credit for. Greg J. Duncan, a University of California economist, was quoted as saying, “Everyone wants to think of education as an equalizer—the place where upward mobility gets started. But on virtually every measure we have, the gaps between high- and low-income kids are widening. It’s very disheartening.”

Granted, Duncan is talking about high school students prepping for college, but the same structure applies to all of us. At the heart, education is meant to be the great equalizer that Duncan mentioned. A college education is something that everyone should have an opportunity to get—if they have the desire to pursue it.

That would be the case if we lived in a more idyllic society. However, unless you’re top of your graduating class, you’re most likely not going to get into Yale or Harvard unless your family has a lot of money, or you’re a descendent of a legacy family.

Changes in the family structure partially responsible for the widening class divide. No longer do we buy into the idea of the nuclear family—we haven’t for a long time. The amount of low-income students living in single parent homes has grown substantially in the past few decades. When family income is lower, the financial aid is higher, but because the majority of federal aid comes in the form of student loans, the amount of debt accumulated over the course of school is also higher.

Expensive doesn’t even begin to describe college, and the fact that we treat it like a business rather than something that’s truly aiding people with higher education doesn’t help. Education is a beautiful thing, and we shouldn’t treat it as a privilege just for the elite and wealthy. And we shouldn’t have to compromise our education just because our family’s tax bracket is lower than others’.

Higher education costs money, and a lot of it. We’re provided with this great opportunity, and the media and entertainment sells us the idea that we’re given the chance to change our fate, despite our economic backgrounds.

The way things are right now, though, it’s impossible for middle and lower-middle class folks to get a college degree without some kind of debt. That sucks, but it’s a reality for a large percentage of college students right now.

Other countries don’t seem to have this issue like we do. Then again, most developed European countries follow a more socialized education system, and much of the cost of higher education is either paid for by the government, or available to more people at a lower cost.

So, there we have it. Most of us can’t afford college. There’s not really an easy solution to that apart from universities lowering tuition, and the government like, I don’t know, abolishing student debt?

Wishful thinking aside, school should be more readily available for everyone, not just those who can pay for it out of pocket. The U.S. supposedly bases all its laws and practices on the idea of freedom, so how about we start acting like it in terms of education?