TL;DR: Cancel student debt.

Today I made the final payment on my student loans. I’ve been accruing or paying student debt for 51% of my life, starting in 2002 when I took out a $9,000 loan to cover my out-of-state tuition and board for one semester. At its highest, I owed $126,000 in principal and interest to pay for four years of undergrad and two years of grad school.

I’m still deeply uncertain about the cost-benefit of it all. Without taking on student debt I couldn’t be where I am today; by taking on student loans I traded my future for my present. Here’s my attempt to pull back the curtains of how I got here.

In the United States we make a choice to ask our students to pay for a chance to gain a credential that might open doors to increasing opportunities and income, but increasingly comes with no guarantee. In other words, a lottery. Without student loans I would not have been able to pay for my lottery ticket. My parents dutifully filled in the FASFA and co-signed my loans. That was the limit of their support, Expected Family Contribution (EFC) be damned. With little guidance available from overworked administrators and teachers and parents without 4-year degrees, high-school aged me didn’t comprehend how to make all of the pieces of my profile come together into an eye-catching application, or what I needed to do and be in order to qualify for prestigious fellowships and grants. So I paid for everything. With interest.

Why do we want our teenagers making such substantial financial decisions? My $9,000 loan for one semester cost $16,000 at full maturity. That’s an increase over value of 77%. 18-year old me (pictured here in my 2002 dorm, grinning in my polyester junior power suit) was nowhere near mature enough to understand that I was trading every dollar of today’s dorm room for a smaller, less safe apartment five or ten years later.

The black cloud of student debt colors every decision I’ve made for 19 years. Every choice is filtered through the lens of my ability to pay for money already spent, from housing to jobs to groceries. With debt, the money you earn isn’t actually your own. For every promotion or raise, an increase to my income-tied repayment plans. Accrued debt that paid for the chance just to have a chance sucked up all but my minimum living requirements. At my lowest, I recycled loose bottles and cans for grocery money and paid for mandatory publishing fees on my mom’s credit card but kept the reimbursements to pay for rent. Sorry, Mom.

One can be forgiven for thinking that in the United States we view poverty as an earned punishment for lacking in good guidance.

Paying for education did allow me to develop a consumerist mindset though; I am empathetic with students who expect a passing grade no matter their real outcomes or efforts. Paying for education inverts the understanding of return on investment in higher ed. Dollars spent for grades earned become the metric in terms of realized value. We all end up poorer when the goal of higher education is the grade, not the learning.

My lottery ticket ended up paying off, with a career that is deeply meaningful and I love, but, also, a salary enabling me to only work through 19 years of debt. My lottery ticket paid off but just like all lotteries, while it paid off for me, for so many it never will. I understand this from our national statistics on debt, home ownership, and wealth. I recognize this in the delayed life choices of friends, people I’ve known since kindergarten who still live on the same street. And I see it in real time as an educator, where choices between studying and hourly jobs, between “required” textbooks and tomorrow’s utility bills are always just around the corner.

Because today I have paid off my student debt there is no doubt that I am one of the lucky ones. And I truly see it this way: I am fortunate to have a family who backed me up when they could, a husband who respected and agreed with my desire to have all of my earned monies be my own for the first time in my adult life. But I am mainly lucky: by circumstance, and the results of risky choices like living in debt that went my way. Today’s results did not have to be the end of my story, and for many of the holders of our collective $1.71 trillion in student debt it will not be.

The student debt market works the way that it does by design; we made it so and we maintain it with our choices and our policies. But at what point is the level of information asymmetry so high that the student debt market becomes Akerlof’s Market for Lemons? We chose to design the market this way, but we can also make different choices. We can choose to be a society that doesn’t use a lottery to determine who gets to enjoy financial stability and who pays in until they break. We can choose to cancel student debt.

There is finally energy in the national conversation around how we pay for higher education, most prominently competing proposals on cancelling $10,000 or $50,000 in federal student loans. Even though the system in place is devastating students, there remains a Kantian argument against cancelling student debt because the investment one makes in themselves with higher education is also a promise to oneself, and promises should not be broken. I would argue that this premise is off: adult me made good on promises made by young me, who made those promises without understanding the cost of the game.

I wrote this because I expected to be overjoyed but the main emotion I feel is hurt from the weight of decades of student debt. On the one hand, for the first time I can save or take a vacation without the guilt burden of robbing Peter to pay Paul. I can make choices without the reality of student debt clouding my options. On the other, thinking back on the opportunities which I was priced out of, while I’ve paid off my education debt, I do not know at what cost.

I wrote this because from the outside I appear to have my life together in a bastion of privilege: I am a white woman in tech with top-notch degrees and the ability of pay off a mountain of debt. Even for lucky people like me, student debt can feel insurmountable.

I wrote this for all of the students and parents who think they are alone in struggling through their cost-benefit analysis. The choice between a college degree and financial stability is impossible and unfair. Our system of funding higher education is broken.

I wrote this in hope of reaching just one person with a degree of influence on our national policies. To our national policy makers: approve legislation for cancelling student debt. Our national economy is not better off for continuing to extract between 2.75% and 7.81% daily accruing interest from an estimated 1 in 8 Americans. What was meant to propel those with less opportunity forward is shackling them to the past.

My lottery ticket paid off, so cancelling student debt won’t help me. And yes, it will help some people who would eventually pay off the debt by themselves. Do it anyway. Now, when so many are struck by the ramifications of a year+ long pandemic, is the time to act.