Classes are about to start again for all of us lucky bastards who are gambling our future earnings against our mounting debts. Were Henry the one writing this, he’d probably tell me it’s a sucker’s bet, while Mike would tell me that hiding out in an ivory tower is a wonderful way to pass a recession.
I like to view college as a few years of constant anal rape with the hope of a reach around at some point in the future.
That sounds bad, doesn’t it? That’s because I’m pretty burned out on college. And you know what? It wasn’t the classes that burned me out; it wasn’t the idiot students that are a decade younger than me; it wasn’t the professors who manage to go through an entire semester without learning the name of a single person in their class of 16 students; it’s the god damn price.
Up until this point, I’ve been taking out student loans to cover my course, and help a little with bills. I paid rent, bought groceries, and blew fun money from the part time job I had. It wasn’t much, but I was comfortable. My first semester back in school was a breeze. So was my second. By the end of the summer classes, I was beginning to worry. I’m now three years in, a Junior, and all I do is worry. Tuition has skyrocketed under Texas’s orgy of deregulation, and there’s no end in sight. I’m going to be in school for at least another year and a half unless something derails me, and more and more, that’s looking like it’s going to be the money situation. I had to take out a massive loan this year to make sure I can pay my rent while in class, because the jobs I’m finding in town are really damn hard on full time students
I am paying almost 400 dollars more for 12 hours of class this semester than I did last Spring. That wouldn’t be so bad if I wasn’t paying close to 175% of what I did three years ago.
When/if I graduate, will I even be able to pay off this massive debt in the following decade? Will I be paying off my student loans into my 40s? I think so.
Am I alone in this almost crippling worry? I’d like to hear what you internet heathens and social networking savages have to say about it.
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