To most of the world, America’s student debt sounds like something out of a dystopian novel. European countries like Germany, France, Austria, and Norway all allow students to study undergraduate degrees for free (or nearly free), with nominal administrative and accommodation fees of around $1,500 per semester.
Across the Atlantic? Well, this exceedingly miserable TikTok just about sums it up. Alyssa Jeacoma (@lightweightlyssie) posted an emotional and relatable video that’s gone viral. She discusses her student loan, which she agreed to at age 17 and that comes with a crushing 17% interest rate.
Jeacoma explains she’s been paying it off at a steady rate of $1,500 per month and, after two years, had assumed she’d almost cleared her debt. Then she checked her balance, and her world fell apart:
“What I thought I’d been paying off for all this time… I owe more than I started off with! So Jeff Bezos, this would be a really cool f**king time to Venmo me bro, I owe $90,000, and I didn’t even spend that much on school!”
She continues:
“Just signed up to be an egg donor. Guess what, got approved. Who wants my f**king kids – I can’t afford them so start a bidding war! What do you want, my left arm too? What the f**k am I supposed to do? I’m going to be in debt for my whole f**king life! How does even make sense, I signed up for this when I was 17! This should not be legal, bro.”
Vampire boomers sucking our blood
We can only sympathize. One of life’s cruel jokes is that the people profiting from these nightmarish prices and interest rates probably attended college in the ’70s and ’80s. A college student in the 1970s might expect to pay $2,000 – $4,000 total (including room, books, etc) for a degree, while a 1980s student would have paid up to $7,000 total.
But, much like home ownership, boomers have firmly and swiftly yanked up the ladder behind them, deciding to trap younger generations in inescapable debt, squeezing them dry for the rest of their natural lives.
Replies are sympathetic, with many in the same boat. One notes “a kidney is 30k, ask me how I know”, another notes they graduated 10 years with $31k in debt and now owe $59k, and the general mood is that this is “the most valid and relatable crash out on the internet”.
It’s a sick joke that the American education system punishes its brightest and most ambitious students by dangling college as the ultimate aim throughout high school, then signs them up to crippling debt plans that will ruin their lives.
You might almost conclude that those in power would rather regular people remain poorly educated simpletons, with college education reserved only for a wealthy elite to rule over the rest of us. But that’d just be crazy, right?
