Dealing with debt, learning to live without

Jennifer Ditlevson Haglund

TJ Maxx, where we bought many of our school clothes and winter coats, was a 25-minute drive from my childhood home. For years, we drove there to complete our wardrobes. As early as grade school, we knew we had a budget.

Even with a budget, we frequently had to use layaway. We returned several times, much to my little brother’s annoyance, over the summer and fall to pay slowly on the clothes we wouldn’t carry out the store with us on the same day. After casually browsing the new arrivals, we’d make our way to customer service in the back where my mother would open her wallet and unfold a couple of twenties or write a check. Layaway made more sense than getting a store card. You weren’t tempted to buy anything you couldn’t pay for, because once you’d begun the investment, you had to pay it off.

Lessons about finances weren’t specific in our household, but the general impression I perceived was that avoiding spending money you didn’t have would save you trouble. This seemed logical enough until it affected my education.

During my senior year of high school, my father told me I could go for free in my hometown at the university where he worked and would receive full tuition remission, or I could figure it out on my own. I was ungrateful then, because it seemed lame to live at home and miss out on the “college experience.”

If only I could hug my father for his commitment to keeping his kids out of as much debt as possible — especially because I was a journalism and English double major. I wouldn’t have paid off all that private liberal arts education until I turned 40.

While the average undergraduate debt currently totals approximately $25,000, I know several people who left college with far more than that and went to graduate school and racked up even more while there. Even if they’re living small, those burdened with debt will take years to repay their loans.

It’s easy to blame students for their choices to apply for financial aid they can’t afford, but most high school seniors have no idea what it means to work slowly and diligently to pay for something worth the investment, even if they buy their first cars from summer job money. Most colleges cost way more than what you can earn in a summer. When students sign their FAFSA in following years, they’re merely jumping through the hoops they’re told they need to for getting their obligatory college education.

The blame could fall on parents and guardians for not explaining the commitment, the risks of defaulting, and the impact the debt could have when brought into a relationship. Although heads of the home are responsible for educating their children about their choices, predatory lending and astronomical tuition contribute to the problem as well.

In an article last year, Forbes blamed the bloat in administrative overhead and the glut of qualified professors willing to work for low pay for the drastic increases in student expenses. Also, whereas a four-year degree used to be the ticket to getting ahead, now it’s more about having it just to get by. Entry-level positions in admissions offices now sometimes require or strongly recommend a master’s.

I know I was beyond lucky in my situation. My parents found a way to give most of their children a privilege when they didn’t have enough money to send them to college on savings. If I hadn’t had that benefit, I would’ve had two choices: fall into a great deal of debt, or find the cheapest best option. I might even have had to put my education on layaway, so to speak, earning and saving money for each class and spending my free time applying to any scholarships I could find. Whenever I found students who worked their way through school like this, I respected them and thought them smarter than most. I knew it was harder for them and that I’d be doing the same if my father hadn’t gotten that job.

Around the time my family was paying for clothes on layaway, I remember salespeople offering store credit cards. Every store seems to have one now, and some of them work hard to get their customers to leave the store with bags in hand because they know a good deal and some instant gratification makes the shopper happy.

Institutions have caught onto that attitude and applied it to college educations in the United States. They know students will get the money somehow and bring it because they’ve been told it’s necessary. Maybe if enough people were willing to wait it out and refused to pay such crushing prices by yoking themselves and their children for debt that won’t be paid for the next two decades, something would have to change.

Jennifer Ditlevson Haglund is a former news reporter for the Maryville Daily Forum, now living and writing in New York City.