The realities of student debt

“STUDENT LOAN” IS A TERM that carries an ever-evolving definition, usually changing in meaning with each passing school year.

Early on in your college experience, a “student loan” can be described as one thing, and one thing only — free money.

The whole repayment aspect of a loan fails to register with an 18 or 19-year-old student. Somebody sends you a check, and you’re going to cash it, no questions asked.

Somewhere in the middle of your college career, the guilt-free pleasure you experience in cashing these checks that have been seemingly materializing from thin air suddenly comes to a halt.

The magical money that you have been effortlessly receiving suddenly begins to take on elements of reality, most likely as a result of the following scenario:

A mysterious letter turns up in your mailbox. There is no return address, and it just oozes a poisonous aura that almost makes you wonder if it might contain anthrax.

Instead, it contains something much worse — a pink sheet of paper detailing the amount of money that has thus far been dispersed to you, followed by a friendly (yet somehow intimidating) reminder that repayment will begin soon after you graduate.

Big Brother is watching.

You scan down to the bottom of the page, take a quick glance at the total amount borrowed, and your knees buckle.

This stunning realization that the checks you have been receiving at the beginning of each semester have actually been monitored and tallied by some unknown evil financial entity slightly rattles you.

You tell yourself, “Okay, I’ll save more money this summer and I’ll only accept half of my loan next semester.”

Yeah … right.

When your next financial aid offer comes through over the e-mail, those awful memories of the pink sheet of paper gets erased from your mind almost instantaneously and by reflex, you accept the entire loan — again.

You try to reassure yourself by thinking about a couple of things. For starters, the loans don’t need to be paid off until after graduation, and at the sad rate that you seem to be passing classes, a firm graduation date seems impossible rather than imminent.

To further comfort yourself, you consider the fact that, if you do indeed graduate, you will most likely fall headfirst into a well-paying job that will enable you to pay off your student loans simply by using the loose change that falls into your sofa cushions.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

I’m in my last semester here at Fresno State, and I know that I will soon have to own up to all of those checks that were so generously mailed directly to my house over the past few years.

But, do I feel bad about entering a world in which I am immediately in debt? Absolutely not … and neither should you.

We have no other choice.

College is a strenuous and expensive road, and only a privileged few (i.e. the filthy rich) can make it to the end unscathed.

For the rest of us, taking out loans is a necessary measure in helping to reach that ultimate goal that we’ve been striving for since the first day of kindergarten — a college degree.

I suppose one way to avoid student debt is to evade higher education and choose not to be a student. However, I’m glad I chose to face a future in debt rather than a future in ignorance.

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