Before I begin, let me explain something: this is about the plight of a generation, but it may not be about the generation you were expecting. I’m in my early twenties. This isn’t an essay about any of the horrific atrocities that have faced my grandfather’s generation, like World War II, the Holocaust, or the Great Depression. Nor is it about my parents’ generation – about the Vietnam War that claimed so many lives, the assassination of popular political figures, or Hippies. Each of those generations had their own problems, and I respect them, but those aren’t my stories. Instead, I draw from my personal experience and that of my other twenty-something friends. And that’s what this story is about.

I know a few people who are heroic – or unfortunate – enough to be shipped to Iraq, and even fewer who have done tours of duty in Afghanistan. Most of them joined the military because they wanted to get money for college, since they couldn’t afford it otherwise. I – and the majority of my friends who were born into low-income or middle-class families – went a different route: I borrowed against my future to afford the best college I could get into, and then I borrowed again for graduate school.

Everyone I knew – my friends, parents, grandparents, and all my
teachers and advisors – were thrilled. I worked hard in college and then in graduate school, and I graduated with a first-rate education, in most respects. I did everything the “right” way: I only borrowed student loans, I lived cheaply for the most part, I never carried a balance on my credit cards, I did all the requisite internships and volunteer work and I even had an essay published.

And, as everyone knows, hard work and higher education mean a secure future – right?

One hundred and forty-some thousand dollars later, I recently discovered – they were wrong. I need to pay about a thousand dollars a month, plus rent, plus all my other bills, and in case you haven’t been paying attention to the news for the past year or so, no one is hiring.

I’m in what my mother would call “quite a pickle.” I don’t know if I will ever get out of debt, and I haven’t started my career yet.

And I’m not alone.

It’s common knowledge that the price of tuition increases dramatically faster than inflation. See, for example, Glater, Jonathan D., New York Times, “Tuition Again Rises Faster Than Inflation,” 25 October 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/25/education/25tuition.html; Paganelli, Siobhan, College Media Network, “Tuition outpaces inflation,” 10/28/05, http://media.www.jhunewsletter.com/media/storage/paper932/news/2005/10/28/News/Tuition.Outpaces.Inflation-2242871.shtml. And as a result, people ages 18-24 spend three times the recommended amount of their income for debt obligation. Id. On average. 7.2% of students drop out of college due to debt and/or financial pressures. Id. And of those who stay in college despite how much it costs, 92% of undergraduates will use their credit cards to pay for educational expenses, causing credit card debt to be up at the highest rate for undergraduate students since such a study began. Id. In 2006, 63.5% of people in their twenties were in debt, with the average amount increasing, the average number of late payments rising, and the “charge offs” of loans rising. Id. The fastest-growing group is the one with student loan debt of $20,000 or more; this group nearly doubled in size from 2001 to 2006. Id. Tuition costs have skyrocketed, grants have declined, and as a result the average debt of a person in her twenties – let alone a person with a professional degree in her early twenties – has soared to levels that would be unbelievable in any other age.

But this is just the start of the problem. Due to the recent economic near-collapse and extenuated economic difficulties, jobs are scarce for everyone – but younger workers have been hit the hardest. According to Peter Coy in Business Week’s “The Lost Generation,” (October 19, 2009), in September only 46% of people ages 16-24 had jobs – the lowest rate since the government began counting in 1948. That means that the rate of unemployment for these young adults is 54%. That is worse than the rate of unemployment for the nation of Zambia, which, according to the CIA’s World Factbook, is 50%.

“Big deal,” you may be thinking, “I had to take out loans too and I worked and saved to pay them off quickly enough.” Or, depending on how old you are, “I worked my way through college, and it wasn’t easy, but it taught me financial responsibility.” Perhaps you had a similar experience as a previous boss of mine, who, when he heard a friend was hesitating to follow her dream of going to law school because of the massive debt she would incur, said, “I don’t understand why young people today don’t just start saving money. They go into debt for everything. Why, I thought about it too but I like to be independent. So I worked for a year and saved as much money as I could before law school. I paid my tuition and cost of living with that.”

Can you imagine saving $140,000? In a year? Good luck doing that today, fresh out of college. Oh, and you’ll also probably have tens of thousands of undergraduate loans to pay off while you’re attempting to save for the next educational hurdle. The result is that the so-called “best and brightest” of our age are trapped in an impossibly deep chasm, with a negative net worth, before their careers have even started.

This problem doesn’t just affect the impoverished young intellectuals of our age. It affects everyone. Student loans are debilitating. According to Mindy Fetterman and Barbara Hansen in USA Today, 29% of twentysomethings have put off or chosen not to pursue education because they already have too much student debt; 26% have postponed buying a home for that reason; 11% have put off marrying; and 14% have put off having children. (“Young People Struggle to Deal with Kiss of Debt,” 11/22/2006). It causes many young intellectuals to move back in with their parents to cut costs (58%, according to USA Today). Obviously, it affects the Boomer generation to have to extended responsibility for the semi-incapacitated Boomerangs. Especially when the Boomers are also struggling with layoffs and the other adverse effects of the Recession.

With this in mind, I ask you to look beyond my petty complaints of self-inflicted mortal economic wounds and even the current statistics, and ask a larger question: what does this mean for our future? And how will our nation look in the next few decades as a result?

I’m no expert at making such forecasts. But let me tell you how it looks from where I sit: I see my generation struggling – and, I fear, failing – to support the Boomers in their retirement and failing to pay basic bills because we ourselves are overwhelmed by debt. I see us getting crushed by the heavy costs of healthcare (in my twenties and at presumably the peak of health, I pay $166 a month because of the dreaded “pre-existing conditions” – in my case, some generic $4 acne medication, birth control pills, and a previously sprained ankle). I see many of us who went to college not being able to afford to ever have children or buy a home. Many of my friends who went to college and graduate school cannot even afford a car.

Is this what we really want – an entire generation of people in serious debt for all of their adult lives?

Let me make this clear: I’m not asking for “handouts.” I’m not whining about my lot in life as if I don’t know it’s still relatively decent compared to some. But, I admit, even at the tender age of Twentysomething, I fear not only for my future, but for ours as a nation.

I was raised to believe that education was the very heart and soul of a democracy. My mother was a Civics teacher. I grew up learning "Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day,” (Thomas Jefferson). A friend from Pakistan warned during the Benazir Bhutto assassination affair that democracy was not good for Pakistan because “the people are not educated, so how could they govern themselves?” So I can’t help but think that this is not just a personal tragedy for me and for so many others – it might be much, much larger than that. If we persist in this “debt-for-diploma” mentality, in which most people can only get an education by mortgaging, perhaps forever, their future – what then?

Out of my friends, those who received the best educations from the more prestigious schools are suffering the most acutely. We followed all the rules. We got our advanced degrees with stars in our eyes, knowing that we were doing it for the betterment of society, for our futures, and for our own financial stability. But we knew wrong. We believed in social mobility, in the idea that even people like me who come from poorer families in rural towns can, in the mighty United States, still get a fine education and even someday count ourselves among the intellectual elite, if we work very hard at it and are very clever. Are we really wrong?

I have spent this essay lamenting the state of myself and my well-educated friends. But I do know one person in his twenties who succeeded at the American dream. He owns his own home and he is free from student loans, because he never darkened a university’s or community college’s door. He is a professional truck-driver. And it is my belief, as I look despairingly at my student loan bills and search for jobs in a closed and inhospitable market, that he made better decisions for his future than I did.