Originally published in Teen Vogue.
Over the Last Decade, Wages Have Stayed the Same While the Cost of College Has Skyrocketed
They’re drowning in student loan debt, victims of stagnant wages, sideswiped by political circumstance. As you may have heard, or know from personal experience, young people are being left behind by the United States’ economy, especially over the past 10 years, according to a report released by Young Invincibles, a young-adult research and advocacy group.
“We’re able to make an apples-to-apples comparison between the young people entering the workforce as the recession hit and those entering the workforce today,” Soncia Coleman, senior director of programs for Young Invincibles, tells Teen Vogue.
When not blundering on solutions, American leadership continues to ignore the crisis. In 2017, education secretary and billionaire Betsy DeVos rolled back Obama-era student loan protections meant to help students better manage their debt. The New York Times reported that the Education Department, under DeVos’s watch, refused to approve even one application for federal student loan relief in the second half of 2018, according to department data.
“While President Trump and his administration laud the economy and a low unemployment rate, our analysis shows that there is a whole generation of young people who aren’t reaping the benefits of ‘the greatest economy in history,’” Coleman says. “The economy is not working for young people.”
But for debt-mired former students like Ashley Payne, the economy doesn’t feel like the “greatest in history.”
“When you have an education system where people are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for an education […] and they’re only going to make a fraction of that as their salary, that’s not a good indicator of our economy,” Ashley tells Teen Vogue. Black women today are victims of the most student loan debt, according to a 2018 report by the American Association of University Women, as reported by Newsweek. Some experts say this is largely due to a big increase in four-year college-completion rates among black women and disproportionate pay once they graduate. Once again, the deck is stacked higher against minorities, limiting their options and forcing them to prioritize basic necessities.
When her Department of Education loans maxed out during her senior year at Fisk, Ashley says she was rerouted by the government to private lenders. Juggling two majors, and dealing with the fact that she’d taken on more debt — this time, to private lenders, who offer fewer protections for borrowers — she still managed to graduate number two in both of her majors. She left Fisk with a 3.82-grade-point average — and $50,000 in debt. It was all an effort, she says, to achieve a dream that society had convinced her was attainable.
But there is hope. As young people gain more political capital, the days of avoiding the albatross weighing them down are over. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), one of many 2020 contenders counting on the millennial vote, released a plan in April to cancel $50,000 in student loan debt for anyone with a household income under $100,000. She says her proposal would be paid for by a 2% tax on households with a net worth of at least $50 million. Warren also presented a strategy for making public colleges tuition-free.
“Leaders in Washington have a real opportunity to address the causes of this crisis,” she says.