A Tale of Indebtedness
To whom do we owe when we are given a gift?
Greetings, Talking About Money Community, I am sending warm thoughts your way… 🕊
In this post I want share a story.
This story is about a particular person in a particular place at a particular point in time. But all the same, I think that this story reflects many people’s lived experience in trying to break into the middle class for the first time in their family’s history. It’s about the messages that they receive, and the choices that they make with the knowledge that they have.
As always, I’d love to hear what you have to say, either in the Comments section below or on LinkedIn. Enjoy.
There once was a teenage boy full of dreams. He is bright – people tell him so – and he wants to do big things with his intellectual gifts. But this is not so simple on a farm in Eastern Kentucky, where his people have lived for more than a hundred years, and where his own father has but an 8th grade education.
But the stars came into alignment to give him that chance – a full scholarship to a prestigious university in New England, a place no one in his family had ever dreamed of, never mind ventured. He lasts but one year until a combination of homesickness, lack of funds for the extras not covered by his scholarship (suit jackets, ties, transportation), and a younger sister who also needs to go to college, coalesce against him. He puts his dreams on hold and comes back to finish college closer to home. He might not be fulfilling his original audacious dream, but he does get a college degree.
Fast forward 15 years and now this young man is married and has young children of his own. With his college degree he is able to obtain a professional position (“a thinking job behind a desk”) and climb into the middle class, albeit 1,000 miles from where he grew up. Since he has accomplished this feat, he is needed to help others in his family constellation, so he uses part of his professional middle-class salary to send money back to Kentucky each month to cover a family member’s rent and incidentals. But he is content and grateful to have achieved this much.
This man also has a daughter of his own. She is bright like her father, and she has hopes and dreams of her own. But this man is not like his father in one important way -- he wants more than anything else to be able to support his daughter in completing her college education in full at a school of her choosing.
That daughter grows up too fast and is now a senior in high school. He sees himself in her, and as a newly minted member of the middle class, he wants to give her what he himself was not able to have. He tells her, “Try to get into the most competitive school that you can, and we will take care of the rest.”
And so, that winter she tries her best, and writes her applications, and crosses her fingers. The following spring comes around – the spring of her senior year of high school – and as the trees are beginning to bud and the flowers are starting to bloom, the days of waiting for the daily mail containing thin or thick envelopes begin.
The first envelope is thin. “We thank you for applying,” it reads, “but there is no room for you in our freshman class.” And then another thin envelope arrives, and then another. Until finally, the 4th and final envelope arrives, and it is thick. She’s gotten into college.
Then comes the hard part for the parents, the part when you pay for the college that you have committed to your child to support. The promise that you have also made to yourself that a second generation of your family will maintain their middle-class status, after hundreds of years of subsistence farming and the limited opportunities that go along with it.
This father and his wife had saved diligently for 18 years, squirreling away what they could each month into a savings account at their local bank. Never did they dream that those hard-earned savings would be gone after the first semester, with seven more semesters to pay.
So, wanting to stay true to their commitment to their daughter, they put their heads down and they work. They budget. They scrimp and they go without, even though they have another child at home. And they get through the next three years.
Then their daughter’s senior year comes around (where had the time gone?) and their daughter is close to the finish line of completing her college degree. She has worked so hard at this college, plying herself to the rigorous demands of the academics, working a part-time campus job, and eking out a toehold in a culture maintained by her upper-class peers. She is going to finish.
But there is no more money. What else was he going to do? In this last year of college, the man and his wife take out a student loan for their daughter, one that one day would be her debt alone to repay. They have done all that they could do.
And this daughter, like her father before her, and her grandfather before that, puts her head down and she works. She gets a job, and then a better one, and she makes her student loan payments each month faithfully and on time. And she is able to pay that loan off.
But what if?
What if this daughter had been paying on her student debt when President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan had been announced?
Should she have been deemed worthy of student loan forgiveness?
After all, she most certainly would have qualified for it. Sure, there were other options that her parents might have taken. They might have made her transfer to a cheaper school for her senior year. They might have made her take a leave of absence until they could have saved more money.
Who really knows what they could have done. But they had made a commitment to their daughter, to give her a college education and the professional and world-enhancing opportunities that came with it. They made a commitment to themselves to stave off for a second generation in a row the back-breaking work that comes when you have few alternatives for employment. And isn’t that part of what makes up the American Dream?