The Other Kind of “Forgiveness”

Recent statements by the prospective Democrat presidential contenders virtually assure that the issue of student loan forgiveness is going to be up for debate an in the news at least until the primary is over (whether or not it will be significant in the 2020 race remains to be seen). 

 

Lost in the shuffle is a type of student loan forgiveness that is fundamentally different from what the Democrats have been lately talking about, however. There is indeed something to the idea that there is a concerted effort to mislead 18 and 19 year olds (many making the first adult decision of their lives — whether or not to take on debt for school), but even those who try to make a responsible decision (like seeking out the best deal for loans, should they decide to take them on) will find themselves misled regarding their major’s job prospects.



Let me preface this by saying that I’m not in favor of wholesale student loan forgiveness, but some loans had “forgiveness” as part of the bargain that was offered when the student agreed to take the loans, and that makes the issue of “forgiveness” in those cases a bit different.  In addition, lots of promises get made to students along the way, and there’s a difference between honoring those promises and simply allowing irresponsible people to “take a mulligan.”



I started college when I graduated high school in 1997. I went to a state university, in part to save money, and in part to stay closer to home. Even then, tuition prices weren’t too bad. I think I paid $13,000 a year, including the residence costs of living on campus. I didn’t want to be one of the irresponsible kids who were “undeclared” and mucked around for two years trying to “find themselves.” My aptitude was never in math, and while I enjoyed science, the science majors would have required increasingly difficult math.  I was going to major in the humanities, and I declared a major before my first class: English. I wanted to be a teacher, but I had been convinced to major in English and not history because of the supposed versatility of the major. If I majored in history, I could realistically only use it to teach, but “every company needs articulate people who can write well.”  If I majored in English, I would have training and a degree I could always parlay into some new career direction, or so I had been told by guidance counselors, parents, and most of the respected adults in my life.



That was my first bit of profoundly bad advice, only it would take me a decade to realize it.  The companies that had a need for someone like me invariably wanted a communications degree or a marketing degree instead of English (or, “English plus” some other degree relevant to their field).



I had decided not to double-major in English and education, so I graduated (on time) with a B.A. in English and a creative writing concentration. I had been told there was an “alternate route” for teacher certification wherein one started working in a school without certification, participated in a mentor program while taking some pedagogy classes, and earned the certification while working full time as a teacher.  That seemed the more responsible route than tacking on a fifth year of undergraduate work.



That was my second bit of profoundly bad advice, and I would come to realize that much more quickly than the first bit.



After graduation, I couldn’t find a job. I applied to over forty high schools with only a single interview — a failing Catholic high school that interviewed and hired me while the first day’s classes were already in session because one of their English teachers had unexpectedly quit on short notice.  I was paid half what the public school teachers in the same town were paid, and I was grateful to have it.  Apparently, while the “alternate route” program did exist, there were so many English majors with teacher certification running around looking for work, there was no incentive for a public school to hire me without it. 



At the end of my first year, I enrolled back at the state university for the certification classes.  In the end, I would have to leave the full-time teaching job because, even though the state university had a program for doing “in-service” at out-of-network schools, they didn’t like to actually approve students for it (mentor teachers would have to make the trip to the school where the student worked, and most didn’t want to be bothered). So, if I was going to complete my program, I would have to quit actually teaching so that I could do my fieldwork and student teaching at network schools. Either that, or I would have to resign myself to teaching for low pay at a school which would be closing a few years later anyway.



I began substitute teaching so I would have the schedule flexibility to do the fieldwork while remaining in the classroom as much as I could. When it came time for my “professional semester” of student teaching, I took a job working retail so I could work nights after spending all day in the school.  



As I neared the end of my program (which took six years, as I paid for all my classes out-of-pocket without taking any more loans), my program advisor told me that for two more ed. psych. classes, I would have both a teacher certification as well as a master’s in teaching. I decided to take the two more classes.



I graduated with a Masters in Teaching English and a provisional teaching certificate.  I would need to work full time at a qualifying school before that provisional certificate would convert to a standard certificate.



But I still couldn’t get hired as a teacher. There was a lot of competition for each English position, even for someone who had an MA (I found out later that one school had 400 applicants for a single slot). While I was looking for full-time work teaching high school, I began to teach adjunct courses at two local community colleges because positions there only require a master’s degree.  One of the schools is absolutely fantastic. They have a great program and really nice facilities for teaching.  I was teaching the developmental (i.e. “remedial”) English courses (non-credit courses for students who fail the placement test but have still been admitted to the college). I kept applying for high school positions (about 50 per year) and all the college positions that came up (these were far fewer). 



My supervisor told me that in order to be considered for a full-time position at the college, I would need to have taught all three levels available to adjuncts.  I told him that I was only ever assigned the developmental courses, and he said that was because my Master’s in Teaching English was really a pedagogy degree, and not an English degree. The new executive vice-president had been insistent that only people with advanced English degrees would be allowed to teach anything other than developmental courses — she had even pulled people who had journalism degrees from courses they’d taught for over ten years because their degrees weren’t “English.” If I wanted to teach the other levels of courses, and if I ever wanted to work there full-time, I’d have to get an M.A. in English.



This was also profoundly bad advice, but it seemed reasonable at the time — I loved teaching college much more than high school, and I wasn’t getting any traction with my high school applications, anyway (and certainly no traction with applications outside of academia).


So I enrolled in an M.A. program for English. I knew I couldn’t do another slow-motion master’s degree, so I took loans this time (I had just paid off my undergraduate student loans). The school was expensive, but I was told that there was a program for teachers that, if I worked as a teacher for ten years, the balance of my loans would be forgiven. 



I only took the loans because forgiveness was explicitly part of the bargain.



I began teaching the other levels of courses (while continuing to apply to high schools and other colleges as well as companies of all stripes).  By then, I was teaching part time at four different colleges. I loved what I did, and I looked forward to the opportunity I would have to nab one of those full-time positions.



But I was passed over for interviews time and again. I asked my supervisor what I could do to make my application more effective, and he told me that even though community colleges only require a master’s degree for their full-time positions, there are so many people with doctorates in English who can’t find work that there’s no shortage of them in the applicant pool. In short, an M.A. is the requirement, but the hiring committee rarely has to look at people that far down the pile.  If I really wanted to be a professor (even at a community college), I’d have to earn a doctorate.  Because I was already a known quantity thanks to my adjunct work, I’d then be much closer to the head of the pack.


This wasn’t exactly bad advice, because it was true, but in many ways I was foolish to have been tempted by it. Still, I was in a bind. Colleges wouldn’t interview me because I didn’t have a doctorate. High schools wouldn’t interview me because I had two master’s degrees but only a provisional certificate and “no experience” (as they figured it — they didn’t count Catholic school teaching or college teaching for their purposes, yet I had over a decade of classroom experience by that point!), meaning that they would have to pay a high salary based solely on the degree as per the union contract. Companies wouldn’t interview me because virtually all of my education, training, and work experience had been as a classroom teacher — considered by them both irrelevant as well as a red flag (i.e. “Why is is applying here? He’ll just leave after we train him! He obviously wants to be a teacher!”).



So I took more loans and enrolled in a doctoral program (D.Litt, not Ph.D.)  that had rolling admission and could be completed in record time. I completed all the coursework in 2 years and wrote my dissertation in one more. I graduated with a 4.0 (actually, a 4.03 because one of my courses deemed that I had done so well they gave me an honors credit). 



Once I had done that, I was able to get a few temporary and/or non-tenured full-time college teaching positions, but they would always last only for a time before I’d be looking again.



I still struggle to find a job or even get interviews, and my degrees basically qualify me for teaching at the community college or high school level — jobs that pay about $60,000 in my area (which is one of the higher paying areas of the country — public high schools can pay in the upper 70s or low 80s for my degrees, but I’m not likely to get much consideration from them for precisely that reason.). I have over $130,000 in student loan debt, all taken on the promise that there was a student loan forgiveness program for teachers after ten years.


I did have a small stroke of luck in that I stumbled into two full-time job offers at the same time since the start of the year (after being out of work except for more substitute teaching for almost two years — with almost 200 job applications sent to colleges, high schools, and other companies). This past year, I begin working for the State Department of Corrections teaching inmates (the pay is about what the community colleges pay). 



So about that “forgiveness” program — here’s how it actually works.  If I used the standard repayment plan (i.e. the loan is paid in full in ten years), my student loan payment would be over $1400/mo. There’s an income-based repayment plan that bases my payment amount on my actual income. That comes to about $360/mo. Of course, at that rate, the interest is accruing exponentially, so the loans could never actually be paid off in my lifetime at that rate.  If I work in a qualifying job while making payments under a qualifying plan “for 10 years” (i.e. 120 payments while working full time as a teacher, or for the government, or in health and human services), the balance of my loan is “forgiven.” The amount “forgiven” (which will be for me about $85,000 at that time) gets tacked onto my real income for that year, which I am then taxed on (I’m surmising that will mean I’ll have to pay about $20,000 in federal income taxes that year while making a salary of what by then will be $75,000 or so).



I know that story wound up very long, and it took in two separate issues, but I think it’s important that the audience here know what’s actually going on out there, and the fine distinctions of some things like the difference between the existing “loan forgiveness program” and the kinds of things the Democrats are spouting off about. There’s a big difference between someone who wants their loans wiped out because of buyer’s remorse and someone who took loans because a “forgiveness” avenue was part of the original bargain (and isn’t a blank slate, either). As we all make our arguments, we must be careful that they are accurate and informed. And even more importantly — that we help the young people in our lives avoid the same traps I fell into when it comes to choosing a major with good prospects and avoiding the sunk-cost fallacy in their future career paths.