The book captures the personal journey I went on as a borrower, trapped in this system, slowly becoming aware of the predation and inequality that was entrenched in the model. At first I felt intense shame and isolation. Debt often creates that emotional experience for borrowers. Culturally, we’re told that to be in debt is to be failing morally, especially if we can’t pay that debt back. Even though I hadn’t acquired the debt, I also felt that way. I didn’t talk about debt with friends or colleagues; if I did talk about it I did so in very limited ways because I was embarrassed.
Gradually, that experience of shame and guilt shifted outward as I placed blame on the lenders and the government. I can remember a particular turning point, when I first began to understand it was not about me or my mom or any one person’s decision. I needed my loan servicer, American Education Services, to send me paperwork, so I could refute each individual loan that they managed. But they wouldn’t send it to me. I would call them, and they would say, “We already mailed it to you,” and they hadn’t.
Then I would ask, “Could you email it to me?” And they couldn’t email it to me, and they also couldn’t fax it to me. Eventually I got a lawyer involved, and then I needed to sign different kinds of permission for him to communicate with them, but they also wouldn’t send me those permissions, and so my lawyer couldn’t talk to them. It became sort of darkly funny how hard it was to get information about the loans. The level of security around the paperwork stands in absurd contrast to the security around the actual loans.
As I began to research the book, I tried to understand and capture the system I was ensnared in, interviewing borrowers who hadn’t experienced fraud but had knowingly taken out student loans and were suffering just as much as I was. Some of them borrowed the average amount of money, around $30,000, and they found jobs after…
Auteur: Kristin Collier
