Forgive Me

 Student loan forgiveness: Let's start with something essential. "To err is human; to forgive, divine." These were Alexander Pope's words. Keeping in mind as a matter of perspective, it is also the guy who said, “Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.” 

As a matter of transparent introduction, I will say that I was incredibly fortunate to have a family that set aside money for all three sons to attend college. As a result, I was free to run up my own personal debt without ever having to involve myself in the racket known as "student loans." The use of the term "racket" was an attempt to further the transparency of my feelings on the issue. At the moment that proto-adults are choosing a path that will take them to their life's work, they are offered vast chunks of money to make this dream a reality. Just sign right here and assume the position. The one you will be in for the next ten years, on average. So all the while, as you prepare for that career and happily ever after, you're being choked with an interest rate that hovers just below six percent. On average. This is a dream deferred, of course, since that average graduate spends twenty percent of their take-home pay on their student loan. 

Such a nice feeling to be above average. Or below, in this case. I am in this unique position of having survived college paying damage deposits for apartments I damaged and the price of a tap for a keg so I didn't have to pay the extra fee every time we needed a keg. No student loans. To experience that magic, I had to get married. My wife meandered as much or more than I did in her path through higher education, completing her degree in a comparable time to mine: six years. A semester off here, an academic probation there, and a transfer to a different institution or two makes all the difference in that timeline. In my case, those years did not incur additional penalties or charges that I would pay for later. Again, I cannot stress enough how amazing it was to emerge from my undergrad experience more or less debt free. If not a little hung over.

My wife was not as fortunate. And not because her parents didn't work to provide a similar opportunity to mine, but circumstances have a way of playing into the spaghetti of personal finances and a college education is not something you can pick up at Walmart. Not currently anyway. So, as we merged our finances as newly married folks do, I became familiar with the world of student loans. And though we promised ourselves that we would never subject our own child to such exquisite torment, we failed. Not that we weren't helped out enormously by our own savings as well as the generosity of family and friends, but a bachelor's degree in 2020 is a very expensive proposition. That average we were talking about earlier hovers right around twenty-five thousand dollars. Our son managed to beat his parents out of college by nearly a full year, but still managed to put an extra chunk of tuition on the end of that "average." 

So if you're asking me about student loan forgiveness? I think it would be divine. Not just personally, but for the reality of all those who have dreams of going to college and earning a degree in anything, but get stuck working in name-tag jobs struggling to make ends meet while they try and made a career out of the degree. I work in public education. Guess how I feel about free public higher education? 

Save your money for the damage deposits.