It Gets Better? Dealing With Student Debt a Few Years Down the Line

Three years ago, The New York Times profiled a then 26-year-old NYU graduate named Cortney Munna about her student debt, which at the time was nearly $100,000. I read that story back then along with many other stories about students graduating with a burdensome amount of debt. A shift was happening — for the first time in U.S. history, Americans owed more on their student loans than they did on their credit cards.

“I don’t want to spend the rest of my life slaving away to pay for an education I got for four years and would happily give back,” Munna said at the end of the Times story. “It feels wrong to me.”

These days, there are numerous stories like Munna’s.

But I wondered: Does it get better? What happened to the graduates the media covered in the years after their stories ran? What happened to Cortney Munna?

I tracked down Munna, introduced myself and asked her one question: Have things gotten better? Here’s how she responded.

A quick summary of my life is that not much has really changed. I’m at the same job (earning a little bit more than I was in 2010, when Ron’s article was published). Low interest rates have made my monthly payments way more affordable than they were when I first graduated in 2005, which is nice…but it’s still a pretty big burden (i.e., costs me more every month than I pay in rent and utilities).

My federal loans are on the IBR plan, which means I haven’t had to pay anything for the last year because my 2011 gross income was pretty low due to having been working less than full time. But my job situation changed at the end of 2011, so once I reapply this year, I will have to start paying more. One thing I learned about the current IBR: They take into account your other federal loans when calculating your “disposable income,” but they do NOT take into account private loans, so that’s a bummer.

All in all, life goes on. It’s frustrating to understand just how much power and protection the private loan industry has, and how little protection is available for consumers. It’s even more frustrating to understand that the private loan boom was a relatively new phenomenon when I started school (in 2001), and it’s downright infuriating that the private loans weren’t granted bankruptcy protection until the very year that I graduated. As federal loans have begun offering these reasonable repayment options, I find it truly maddening that the same options are not required to be offered by private lenders…ESPECIALLY considering they hold the same protected status as the federal loans do.

Personally, I spent the first 5–10 years out of college feeling truly suffocated by my debt, but I have come to accept my situation lately (perhaps due to a solid, steady job that I basically enjoy and allows me to make my minimum payments without giving up everything else), and I generally feel a little bit more in control of my life.

At the moment, I’m a little behind on payments, mainly due to holiday-spending, but I know I will catch up soon. It’s not really clear when my loans will be paid off — from what I can tell, no less than 20 years from now, and maybe more. I try to put a little bit of money into a retirement account every month. I bought my first car a year ago, so that felt like a huge accomplishment. I sometimes consider returning to school for a master’s (in a field that corresponds directly to a job — probably nutrition), but I have had a lot of trouble really committing to an idea and seeing it through. I don’t want to take on more debt, and it doesn’t really seem possible to defer my loans at this point either.

Like I said, life is OK, and I certainly am lucky to have a good job; I just wish I felt like I might one day get out from under this mountain of debt.

Photo: Dennis Crowley

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