We’re struggling to survive’: student debt still weighing down people over 30

[Liberal_in_LA]

I pay $700 a month in student loans and I didn’t go to a fancy school,” explained Deanna Fox, 30, a writer who lives in Delanson, to a table full of people in their 30s and 40s gathered at the Riverfront Bar and Grille in Albany. “But there really wasn’t any opportunity as far as scholarships go: because I came from a very middle-class family, I was too wealthy – even though we didn’t have much – to get a lot of state-funded grants or scholarships, and wasn’t wealthy enough for my parents to pay for me to go to college out of their own pockets.

“So I had to take out probably 75% of my funding for college as a loan, and most of it was private loans.”

“I also pay $700 in student loans a month,” said Emily Lemieux, a 34-year-old museum professional living in Albany, “and I also didn’t go to fancy schools.”

Young millennials get more attention for their student loan burdens, but students faced such hefty burdens nearly 15 years earlier. Most college-educated people in their 30s and early 40s went to college just as tuition rates began their meteoric climbs, and at or around the time when the federal government got out of the student loan game and turned over the origination of federally subsidized loans to private companies like Sallie Mae. These students entered the working world at either the end of the first tech bubble, shortly after 9/11, in the middle of two wars or at the start of the Great Recession.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/07/student-debt-30s-40s-election-issues