Yes, I Want College to be Affordable.
By: Lisa Martens
Tags: Careers, USA, College, Student Loans, Education

Yes, I Want College to be Affordable.

Even if I do not personally benefit.

Yayyyy now get to work. Photo by Baim Hanif on Unsplash

There is a kind of bitterness floating around when it comes to the issue of fixing the student loan system.

It’s the same “well I did it this way, so why shouldn’t they” that gets applied to other issues such as immigration.

I see people who didn’t go to college because of loans make this argument, I see people who didn’t have to take out loans because their parents helped them make this argument, and I see people who managed to pay their loans off make this argument.

I see this bitterness as a form of capitalist trauma…that instead of recognizing an unfair system and aiming to change it, those in pain simply aim to inflict more.

It is okay to have suffered something unfair and unjust and recognize it as unfair and unjust without wanting to inflict that same suffering onto others.

I don’t understand the bitterness — I don’t want other people to went through what I went through (and am going through) to get an education.

Why would I want to curse children with the racism of the past, the homophobia of the past, the student debt of the past, the diseases of the past, and the problems of the future?

There will be other social ills to work through.

Problems, when not dealt with, accumulate. They do not go away.

So if we cling to our past problems out of some misguided bitterness, we are not keeping the future generation stagnant. We are not keeping them in the same place we were.

We are compounding their problems. We are adding our problems on top of the ones they will have…problems we couldn’t even predict.

Our problems will hit theirs and warp their lives in unimaginable ways.

An education is intrinsically valuable.

I see college tied to career and income so often and it just makes me sigh with sadness.

An education is intrinsically valuable. Even if you’re studying sociology or art or something that won’t make you a lot of money.

Again, more capitalist trauma. More of that “you have to earn your existence” mentality.

I want to be able to see children decide to study art and still just do it in their spare time and get an unrelated job (if that’s what they want). I want young adults to pick jobs based on what they want to do, instead of fear of paying loans or of not having insurance. I want people to appreciate an education because it’s interesting to discover the limits of one’s own mind.

I want these things even though they were not opportunities I had. I do not want young adults to have to take three jobs and over 100K in loans to go to college. I do not want them to have to miss out on learning because they’re handing out fliers in winter or signing up for medical experiments for money.

After 10 years, I am just now finding the path that I always knew was meant for me — to be a writer. It was a path I put off and ignored in favor of “real” jobs because I had student loans.

They effectively hijacked my life and decision-making, until now. Why would I want that for other people? If you know your life path and can start working on it at 22, then Go. For. It.

I will be your cheerleader.

I do not want people to have to be traumatized for wanting to be educated.

Why is it weird to think people should be able to learn what they want to learn without being so harshly judged?

A person cannot do their best work or their best learning when stuck in fear, in survival mode. A person panicked over money is not a person who is able to achieve their best self.

Our attitude regarding education is barbaric. It’s based on survival thinking, not higher order thinking. If everyone went to school based on salary and not having loans, we would have no artists. Fewer doctors. No architects. No musicians. No linguists. Fewer scientists. We would be left with what, exactly?

Programmers? Finance bros? Lawyers? Customer service reps? That’s it? That’s really all we need? Is that the future you want…a bland, boring, passionless future, just because you had to, so everyone else should have to? Because you didn’t get that, so no one else gets it, either?

Sounds like the reasoning of a spoiled child, not a civilized nation.

I want them to enjoy being educated for the sake of being educated…and I think, in a country that claims to be advanced and wealthy, that this is something we should strive for, for everyone.

Not just the rich.