Students and graduates who have accumulated educational debt await Sen. Bernie Sanders for a news conference in his office Monday. In the front row, from left, are Christine Mahoney, Emily Sutton, Jazmin Spear and Liz Beatty-Owens.(Photo: TIM JOHNSON/FREE PRESS)
The student loan debt problem becomes less abstract when it comes with a face and a number.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., went a step further Monday in his effort to raise public concern about this issue. He presented 13 faces and 13 numbers.
The faces belonged to Vermont college students or graduates who are accumulating, or living with, college loan debt. They wore placards with the numbers, which ranged from about $20,000 to more than $300,000.
“What’s the crime?” Sanders asked. “What did they do to incur $300,000 in debt? Did they go on a shopping spree? Did they go to Las Vegas and lose all their money? Their crime was that they wanted to get a good education.”
Sanders sat among them at a news conference at his Church Street office and offered brief prologue before four of them told their stories. He said that student loan debt amounts to $1.2 trillion, more than credit-card debt, and that one in eight graduates owes more than $50,000. Meanwhile, the cost of getting a college degree has increased about 12-fold in the last 30 years.
Sanders called the debt burden a tragedy for the middle class and a big problem for the U.S. international competitiveness, as other nations invest more in higher education. Moreover, he said, rising debt levels and college costs discourage many capable young people from pursuing higher education at all.
He said he will be promoting federal legislation that would reduce interest rates on student loans and provide federal funding to states so that qualified high school students can take college courses for credit as a means of reducing their ultimate education costs.
Two of the speakers, both professional graduates, had debt exceeding $300,000. They included Emily Sutton, an assistant professor at the Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences who ran up about $50,000 in debt as an undergraduate in Louisiana even though she was working 30 or 40 hours a week; and Christine Mahoney, an osteopathic physician at Community Health Center, who said she is paying off nine loans with interest rates ranging from 3 to 9 percent and is unable to qualify for a mortgage because of her high debt to income ratio.
Mahoney said the debt burden discourages some people from considering medical careers.
“I make a good salary,” she said. “The reality is that debt makes it hard to sustain this career.”
Jazmin Spear, a junior at Castleton State College, said she expected to graduate next year owing about $29,000.
“Planning for the future seems pretty difficult with all this debt weighing me down,” she said.
Liz Beatty-Owens said she’ll be graduating from Johnson State College in August with about $40,000 in debt. That’s on top of $80,000 in debt her mother owes for her own education and that of two children.
Beatty-Owens said she’d held her debt down by working 20-30 hours a week and called herself “one of the lucky ones.”
“I’ve seen too many of my friends drop out of college because they couldn’t keep up with their payments,” she said.
