I took a 40-year break between my junior and senior year in college. At the time I dropped out of school I had no student loan debt. When I returned to complete my degree at Mississippi State I lived primarily on student loans, supplemented with a part-time job at the B-Quik convenience store.
I completed my degree in the spring of 2012 with $28,000 in student-loan debt. I took the three year forbearance on repaying the loans, then enrolled in an income-based repayment plan.
Today, I owe $38,000.
I doubt my story is unique and, for many of the more than 45 million Americans with student loan debt ($1.7 trillion collectively), it’s probably far worse.
Since March of 2020, when federal student loan payments were suspended because of the pandemic, I’ve been waiting to see what relief, if any, might come. The President has extended the repayment suspension multiple times and has talked about some kind of relief, if not forgiving the debt altogether. The latest figure is $10,000 per person, which would get me back to where I started in 2012.
Not everyone supports the idea of student loan forgiveness. The most common arguments are along the lines of “you made your bed, now sleep in it” or “I paid my student loan debt, so why shouldn’t you?”
Both are relevant arguments, but what would be achieved by not addressing student loan debt?
I’m 62 years old, so I probably will never pay off my student loans. But for young graduates, the specter of long-term student loan debt means money they won’t put back into the economy.
What is lost here, I think, is that student loan debt is the symptom, not the illness.
How was it that I could go to college for three years and leave without any debt? In 1982, the state of Mississippi covered 70 percent of the tuition costs. By the time I returned to school in 2011, the state’s share of tuition costs were 30 percent. For families, the cost of tuition between 2009-2019 rose 71 percent while family income rose by just 25 percent.
It’s only going to get worse. State-funding for higher education is down 22 percent since the start of the pandemic already. This year, the state legislature pushed through a $400 million income tax cut (saving the average taxpayer about $150 per year). That will almost certainly mean the state has no intention of restoring funding for higher education in a way that would give students and their families any real relief.
Ultimately, that means a poorer quality of education as schools cut programs and staff to save money. Students will pay for an education of lower quality in some cases.
It’s important to remember, too, that if all $1.7 trillion of the current student loans debt was wiped out today, it would mean little to a student entering college in the fall. In fact, that freshman’s student loan debt is likely to be substantially higher after four years as states devote fewer and fewer dollars to higher education.
Sadly, there is a pervasive anti-higher education sentiment in our state. A candidate whose campaign centered on meeting the state’s obligation to provide a high-quality, affordable college education to every Mississippi kid who wanted it would gain little to no traction. It might even be a detriment.
As long as that attitude remains, Mississippi is likely to languish near the bottom in most economic indicators: GDP, personal income, opportunities.
Today, almost all of the talk is about workforce training as an alternative to a college education. Certainly, improving opportunities for skilled labor careers is something worth supporting. But when workforce training is perceived to be preferable to college education, we risk remaining what Mississippi has always been: a state of laborers not innovators, a state of workers, not employers.
College isn’t for everyone, we are told.
Thanks to insufficient funding and soaring costs, that’s more true than it has ever been.
For all the wrong reasons.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected]
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected]
