Dear Melanie Unruh
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***
I was an interloper.
In the spring of 2011, I graduated from the University of New Mexico with an MFA in creative writing, and yet in 2017, there I sat in an undergraduate nonfiction workshop at the community college where I was a part-time faculty member. I was enrolled in the course, not teaching it. I didn’t have a major and I wasn’t seeking a degree.
This was my third year of taking classes to defer my student loans.
On the first day of the workshop, when it came time to introduce myself, I highlighted my writing, my son, and my quirky hometown, not my status as an underpaid colleague of the instructor.
A few weeks into the semester, when I walked into the room, another one of my co-workers was there to sub the class. As I crept in and tried to take an unobtrusive seat among the students, she gave me a puzzled look and said, “Shouldn’t you be up here?”
I shrugged and said, “Life,” because there was too much to explain, too much indignity to expose.
She had her shit together, or at least the appearance of it. She was beautiful and smartly dressed, with dangling yellow statement earrings I couldn’t pull off even if I had pierced ears; she was full-time faculty and likely didn’t have looming student loan bills that rivaled a mortgage.
My peers never seemed to catch on to my secret. There was no shutting me up in class1, but I was careful not to mention my ties to the school, to out myself. I didn’t look like a fresh-faced undergrad by any stretch of the imagination, but I could have passed for someone in her late twenties who took a break and then came back to school. I envied these kids their inexpensive tuition, the vast blank slate of their futures.
***
If one day a check for the amount of my school debt appeared on my doorstep, what could I buy instead of paying off my loans?
-a 2017 Tesla model S with almost all the upgrades
-1300 instapots
-12 Black Diamond Beauty and The Beast VHS tapes on e-Bay2
-29 pairs of Jimmy Choo crystal suede point toe pumps
-Half of the property value of the house my brother burned down while he was addicted to opioids
***
adjunct (noun): something added to another thing but not essential to it.
[1] Even when I had laryngitis, I still felt compelled to squeak out my opinions about the patriarchy.
[2] Actually, hold that thought. I need to go look through my old Disney tapes.
I’ve been twice fucked by academia. First, I was saddled with massive debt to get my degree. And yes, I do take some responsibility there. I knew how much it cost where I went to school3, but when you’re 20 and have just started living on your own, interest rates and minimum monthly payments are very abstract concepts that you assume will sort themselves out once you have a degree and your dream job. My own family was checked out, so my then boyfriend’s mom co-signed my loans. If my brain had been more fully developed I might have realized what a ridiculous idea all of this was.
On the other side of the equation, to get a legit gig in my field is next to impossible. Each time a full-time position4 has opened up in the English department at the community college where I teach, I’ve applied for it. Once I was among a handful of finalists, culled from a group of 100 applicants, but came up just short. I heard a rumor that some of my full-time colleagues fought for me, but in the end the position went to someone from out of state. Even if I was willing to move my family for a tenure-track creative writing gig at a random school in Nebraska or upstate New York, those precious few positions are reserved for those who already have at least one, if not multiple books published. So here I sit on my pile of debt, teaching classes at a school where I make far less than what my full-time colleagues do, where my assigned courses can be harvested at a moment’s notice for full-time faculty, and where I’ve been employed for nearly seven years, with zero job security.5
[3]After scholarships and grants, it cost me about $30,000 a year to attend Rider University from 2003-2006.
[4] And these are positions in which primarily you teach the same handful of composition and tech writing classes ad infinitum, with the occasional creative writing or lit reprieve, on a 5/5 load.
[5] From the school handbook: “The employment relationship between part time faculty and is term to term. Part time faculty assignments are based on operational need, qualifications, demonstrated competency, and availability...Failure to re-hire or renew a part time faculty member’s contract in a subsequent term(s) does not constitute dismissal (termination), does not require any reason to be provided, and cannot be grieved or challenged.”
There’s an assumption if you teach college classes that a) you’re a professor and b) you make great money. Neither is true for me. The closest I would come to adding “professor” to my title is to call myself an adjunct professor. Adjunct earnings are nothing to write home about either. 6
Last year my husband and I went to H & R Block to get help with our taxes. The accountant was impressed to learn that I taught college courses. Then we handed her our w2s, and her mouth fell open. “This is what you make?”
I nodded.
“Really, it’s—how many classes do you teach?”
“Four right now,” I replied.
She paled and adjusted her red-framed glasses. By the end of our consultation, she congratulated my husband on his recent promotion, handed back my paperwork like it was diseased, and said, “I hope things get better with your job.”
***
Dear Melanie Unruh—
Did you know that if you sign up for monthly direct debit, you could receive a .0001% interest rate reduction? Those savings will add up over the 75-year life of your loan! To find out more, call and speak to one of our apathetic, uninformed loan agents today.
You’re just a number,
The Banking Mafia
[6] According to NPR, “…adjuncts average $25,000 to $27,000 a year, and often much less, regardless of where they teach.”
***
I grew up in a Pennsylvania town about 40 minutes southwest of Philadelphia. It has that idyllic small-town America feel to it: tree-lined streets, mom and pop boutiques, Victorian houses, and a stately brick high school. Kennett Square is known as the Mushroom Capital of the World7, says so on the water tower.
Kennett is, by and large, a wealthy town; I attended a public high school with a healthy tax base, and was enrolled in advanced classes where many of my peers had parents who worked for DuPont, AstraZeneca, and the big banks in Wilmington. For various reasons, many of my friends and I did not fit into the stereotype of our rich classmates, including one whose senior write-up in the yearbook was an ode to his Porsche.
Several of my friends had fathers who were pastors, and another was raised by a single mother. My paternal grandparents had land and a little money, but due to my parents’ aimlessness, mental illness, and drawn-out divorce, we were not a wealthy family. My father worked as a bartender and a housepainter. My mother was intermittently employed, often withdrawn and bedridden, and at least once, homeless.
***
May the Odds Be Never in Your Favor…
[7] No joke. Since I moved away, my hometown now holds Midnight in the Square every New Year’s Eve—a celebration in which they drop, not a ball, but a 500-pound stainless steel mushroom in celebration.
One morning, the people drowning in student loan debt wake up to find that their ledgers have been wiped clean overnight. The banks go crying to the government, but there’s no way to finance a bailout this big.
Unless.
The CEOs, a bunch of old white men in three-piece suits with side-parted hair in varying shades of silver, find themselves thrust into a muddy jungle arena where they must learn to assassinate each other with machetes, grenade-launchers, and poison darts. Two die of heart attacks on day one, cursing the cigars and rare steaks they bought with their blood money over the years. The biggest names go down quickly. At night, the logos for Discover, Sallie Mae, and Wells Fargo illuminate the sky. Navient pursues SunTrust and Citizens Bank around an acidic lake, but by the second day, is decapitated by the Chase executive, who took Jujutsu in middle school.
The indebted8 watch the games on their phones during their lunch breaks at Enterprise, Panera, Geico, and wherever else they’ve been able to find employment. They place no bets and talk only with anonymity on Reddit. Someone asks if their vicarious bloodlust is worse than the executives’ greed. Bitch, please, someone responds.
In the end, as was foretold, only one CEO survives: the lone female executive9, who strangled the penultimate contender with her pantyhose.10
Each kill is worth a $10-20 million annual salary11. It isn’t enough to cover all of the loans, not by a long shot, but since the games are annual, no one wants to lead the banks anymore, they all fold, and their former customers weep with joy.
***
[8] There’s no guarantee the debts will still be gone when the dust settles from this shit show.
[9] I make the rules in this world, okay?
[10] Baby Boomers have never seemed able to shake their devotion to this problematic accessory, but in her case, it proves lifesaving.
[11] This includes stock options, bonuses, and other undisclosed “perks.”
Sometimes when I see an article about millennials and the student loan crisis, it soothes me to learn the stories of others in Bismarck and Charlotte who are caught in the same inescapable financial vice. Other times, there is no solace in knowing that I have much company in this beholden misery.
At the moment, I have student loans with four different companies. It used to be three, but then my private undergrad loans were sold twice, and at least one of the banks has changed its name entirely12, so I often forget who owns what. I could consolidate the grad school debt, but I’m wary because when I did so with my undergrad loans, after a barrage of mail telling me it was crucial to do so A.S.A.P. (!), I locked in my loans at a cool 9.8% interest rate.13
***
Faculty Meeting: A Scene
Part-Time Faculty Member: Is there any way adjuncts can have more notice about how many classes we’ll be teaching, so we can plan our finances? We need to know how we’ll pay our bills.
Full-time Faculty Member: You signed up for this, so you should know there are no guarantees. What do you expect?
Dean: …
Me:
***
I blame myself. I blame myself. I blame myself. I blame myself. I blame myself. I blame myself. I blame myself. I blame myself. I blame myself. I blame myself. I blame myself. I blame myself. I blame myself. I blame myself. I blame myself. I blame myself. I blame myself. I blame myself—
***
Though I live in Albuquerque now, my husband and I decided to have our wedding in Kennett. We held the reception under a tent beside the house where I grew up. When I was 12, to climb out from his own crushing debts, my father sold this house, which was part of the original property my grandparents bought in the 1950s. Dad was still friends with the owner, though, and she was kind enough to let us drink beer and dance to ’90s pop songs in the field I used to run through as a child.
Friends who arrived in my hometown sight unseen were awed. When they drove up to the property, they said, “I didn’t realize Melanie grew up so rich.” This is an understandable assumption. Kennett is the kind of town you would have seen on a teen drama in the 2000s, Everwood or Dawson’s Creek. It’s bucolic and becoming increasingly gentrified, with little breweries and twee cafes and galleries popping up every time I return to visit. My grandparents’ former land is breathtaking: 11 acres that includes woods, a creek, a barn, four houses (three of which used to belong to their children), and rolling green hills that flatten into sprawling fields. Observed in the abstract, my childhood was an idyllic outdoor romp.
But if you put it under the microscope, you find that the outdoors were really my refuge from the unfinished house we lived in, my parents’ fighting, my mother’s suicide attempts and subsequent psychiatric committals, my father and brother brawling in the middle of the night, my brother fleeing to live with far-flung family friends when I was six, and my father’s affair and departure with the tenant who lived above our garage. The divorce would expel us from this place, sending my mother and me to a one-bedroom apartment on the other side of town. I still stayed on and off at my grandparents’ house when my mother went off her meds, but it was never the same. Eventually, none of the property was in the family anymore, once everyone got divorced and my grandparents died.
***
[12] One loan was owned so briefly by Sallie Mae that I barely had time to register what a ridiculous name for a bank that is.
[13] According to SoFi, the 2017 rate for direct unsubsidized student loans was 4.45%. Excuse me while I go throw something at the wall.
***
Dear Melanie Unruh—
We see that you recently called and spoke to one of our loan agents. Would you mind taking a quick 45-minute survey to let us know how we’re doing? As always, you can find answers to most of your questions on our easy-to-use website. Don’t be alarmed that when you Google our site, the first page to pop up is information about defaulting on your loan. That’s an SEO glitch that we’re working on; very few—if any!—customers have trouble paying back their loans.
See you in hell,
The Despots Who Own Your Ass
***
I asked my friends on social media if they’d be willing to share their student loan balances with me. Only a handful of the people who responded had any. Some had recently paid theirs off and others hadn’t gone to college, but the majority of those who felt comfortable responding publicly had never borrowed a penny and had multiple degrees. Those with debt sent me private messages and admitted to their own outstanding balances only on the condition of anonymity.
The internet is lousy with think pieces with titles like “Is Student Loan Debt Strangling Millenials’ Chances for Success?” and “The Student Loan Crisis Is Worse than You Think.” While these are important angles to explore, we tend to overlook the steep emotional cost of being deeply indebted for life. We can try to outrun it, to live our lives on our own terms, but at the core of our existence, many of us feel a humiliation too anxiety-inducing to name. My student loan anguish comes up in counseling periodically, and my therapist empathizes, but I don’t think she or most other Baby Boomers can fully understand the existential dread of the broken higher education system that has metastasized around younger generations.
I want to give my kids a better childhood than I had, so I’m ashamed that I’ve hung this financial albatross over our lives for the foreseeable future. As a young adult, I didn’t understand that children I would have more than a decade later would be impacted by papers I signed one morning at a long, sterile table that felt better suited to a boardroom than a college financial aid office. The smirking loan officer looked me dead in the eye and said, “This is the loan company we use14. Let’s calculate how much you can get.”14
[14] This was before colleges and universities were required to tell you about other loan company options.
[15] Notice he didn’t say “how much you need.”
***
Ways I fantasize about escaping my student loan debt…
-winning an HGTV dream home sweepstakes, where everyone just takes the cash 16
-faking my own death
-publishing a bestseller
- declaring bankruptcy when the law actually allows it to wipe out student debt17
-societal collapse
-actually dying18
***
A friend of a friend recently told me that his property taxes were more onerous than my student loans because my debt was “voluntary.” I had to force myself not to respond because I will lose my shit on someone who thinks he’s entitled to his libertarian wet dream of buying a nice house and paying no taxes on it, but that I should have known exactly what I was bargaining for going into debt for my education. Somebody get me a goddamned pair of pantyhose.
***
I figured out how to apply and get into colleges easily enough, but I floundered when it came to the money side of things. My peers were either loaded19 or their parents at least were involved, visiting financial aid offices, helping them apply for grants andscholarships. I’ve had to take care of myself since a young age, and people always told me how I was so mature and “together,” considering my family circumstances. But I’m not sure financial literacy is something you can master as a young adult, independent or not.
I got good grades in high school and took honors and AP classes. Going to college was never a question, but it was completely up to me to figure out how to do it. Years later, after having transferred several times and finally graduating, my ever-tactful dad said, “You know, if you had just stayed at that state school, you wouldn’t have all this debt.”
A Monday morning financial quarterback for the ages.
***
I wade into a Twitter cesspool after searching #studentloancrisis…
• “Generations of graduates have had student loan debt. They worked and paid it off. #Trump built a great economy for you. No more excuses, millennials.
• “Everyone has student loan sweetheart, the difference is the generation before you understood it was THEIR responsibility NOT someone else’s.”
• “They made bad life choices going to overpriced universities for feel good degrees that will no pay off your obligations. Now they believe those who made good choice should pay for their folly.”
• “All people have to do is pay back their student loan. My kid did it, why can’t everybody else. It’s called being responsible for yourself.”
• “Money from these loans should be given directly to the colleges, not to students to LIVE IT UP on, then expect taxpayers to bail them out.”
• “Nobody is forcing the debt on them. Quit your wining.” 20
• “Well get government out of it and it will be less expensive and you will also get rid of useless degrees in gender studies.”
• “The Liberal run Universities are who you should be going after. Look into inflated salaries by the Liberal elite and there you will find why it costs so much to go to college.”21
• “Don’t want debt? Don’t go to college. Go learn a skill or trade instead. Quit bitching about student loans.”
***
Death Investigation Summary
Case Number: 2018-4535
EDUCATION, HIGHER
Date of Birth: 1636
Pronounced Date/Time: September 16, 2018, 12:06 p.m.
CAUSE OF DEATH: (GROSS MISMANAGEMENT)
MANNER OF DEATH: (NO ONE IS BUYING THIS SHIT ANYMORE)
DECLARATION:
Death of EDUCATION, HIGHER was investigated by the academic proletariat.
I, Melanie Unruh, an indebted perpetual student and underemployed adjunct faculty member, decree that I, along with millions of my peers, have carefully reviewed all the evidence available in the case of academia’s future, and have concluded that the system is not viable.
If you would like to read the full report and review our findings in detail, please return to the beginning of this essay.
[16] The taxes on the house can be upwards of $700,000, so very few winners have ever actually taken the house and lived in it.
[17] You can’t just declare bankruptcy; the government is so adamant you pay these loans back that they stay tethered to you, even when bankruptcy dissolves most other liabilities. Can you imagine how many young people would have gone the bankruptcy route by now? What’s seven years of bad credit compared to a fucking lifetime of insurmountable debt?
[18] My family could still be on the hook for the private loans even if I’m dead, since these have fewer regulations than government-backed loans.
[19] One friend’s mom told me she just “sold a stock” to pay her daughter’s $45,000 tuition one year.
[20] : Would I rather be someone who can spell or someone who doesn’t have any student loan debt?
[21] There are some overpaid faculty members, to be sure, but a bigger culprit is administrative salaries. As Bloomberg notes, 58 college presidents each made more than $1 million in 2015.
Melanie Unruh is a New Mexico-based writer of YA novels, short stories, and creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The Boiler, Cutthroat, Sixfold, Post Road, New Ohio Review, and Philadelphia Stories, among others. She was nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize and received notable mention in Best American Essays. She co-founded Plume: A Writer’s Companion, a community for women and non-binary writers, which has now branched out into Plume: A Writer’s Podcast. When she’s not writing, she enjoys spending time with her family, smashing the patriarchy, reading, and drinking a good cup of chai.