Observer Staff
Our newsroom is made up of people who range from dual enrollment to those returning from professional careers and entirely different lives as students, once more.
To survive you must earn, to thrive you must work, but success depends on how we break our bread – crumbs.
Looking at student debt is like looking at who sits at your table and asking yourself how everyone sat in the same setting. It is considering the crippling National Debt and that as of 12:50 a.m., Feb. 18, 2020, the number has surpassed $1.7 trillion; increasing with an average of $3,000 per second.
To even Google Search, ‘Student Debt in the US,’ leads the researcher down a rabbit hole that influences lifelong credit, financial security, housing security, security for retirement and just about any other decision that influences stable living conditions.
As eligible voters, the concern for who is going to handle student debt does not come without avid criticism of partisan policies, histories of taxing laws, grants afforded to certain communities, lobbying from corporations and other backed channels that influence policies like the federal student loan forgiveness plan.
As college students, we have seen and been taught by those who took loans in double or triple digits, then proceeded to work either 7 or 14 years in marginalized communities to escape lifetimes of crippling debt.
In an attempt to tackle this problem, the state of New York in 2017 introduced the nation’s ‘first’ free-college program that designated students attending specific colleges 2-4 years of free tuition so long as they planned to stay and work in New York following their degree completion.
National statistics also supply that black women are graduating with higher educations than other groups of students, yet still earn on average, $0.80 of the dollar in the workforce.
Looking at Broward College’s salad of students, the reality is that even if we walk out these doors debt-free, the next doors we walk through for higher education may be expensive to climb.
A classic life lesson teaches that as much as you learn in the classroom is as much as you learn outside of it. Posts attributing to life hacks; hobbies that earn side income; entertainment segments dedicated to meals for $2; financial charts that demonstrate goals for every decade of our lives, lead back to the fact that statistically, Millennials and Gen Z cannot afford to live even if they attempt to pursue higher education.
Policies like matching minimum wage to the inflation of the dollar is one that encounters many obstacles from what is seemingly, a no-brainer course.
When looking at our parents, we saw degrees in their fields of work that couldn’t pay bills. From our professors, we heard them say they have paid only the accumulated interest on their loans as opposed to the loan itself – even while working in their high-paying fields.
Keeping up with political opinions, @StudentDebtCrisis, a non-profit on Twitter, has daily tweets about where the number is and how candidates are handling the concern of 54 percent of Americans.
Student Loan Hero by LendingTree contributes this link: https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-clock/. It gives real-time figures surrounding the circulation of money that affects student debt; from how much is currently paid to what is currently being distributed/borrowed for that day.
When asked how we end up sitting at the same table, “money,” is the answer that needs no explanation. The Tampa Bay Times reports that Florida was responsible for $75.9 billion of the nation’s student loan debt. That averages about $35,000 per person which makes it hard for debt holders to purchase homes.
Our situations reflect the fact that a manager for Taco Bell now can make $100,000 from corporate distributors while Florida teachers are just being introduced to a yearly salary of $47,500, proposed by Gov. Desantis last October.
While hopeful for a turn around by the time our newsroom walks across the stage, the fact that the current President signed into budget an almost $5 billion budget decrease for this year’s educational fund, is a foreshadowing of the state of affordability and education for the next generation.
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