Student debt sucker punch.

• Author: Ross, Scot
• Position: FIRST PERSON SINGULAR

MY NAME IS SCOT ROSS AND I'M A STUDENT LOAN DEBTOR. I know the regret of economic opportunity lost to a loan payment, the shame of living like a college student in a rented apartment until I was nearly forty, and the anger of feeling I've been denied the share of the American Dream promised to my generation.

But mine is the story of one of the lucky ones.

I spent the late 1980s and mid-'90s earning an English degree from a state university in Pennsylvania and a two-year master's degree in Washington, D.C. I also "earned" $62,845.17 in student loan debt on a repayment schedule of thirty years at 7.875 percent, compounded daily.

For fourteen years, I have religiously submitted monthly payments, at first making the minimum and then, as my income rose, increasing my restitution.

I rented apartments until age thirty-seven, and I spent years cruising in a maroon four-door sedan, so old it was still equipped with a cassette player.

But I can see a faint light at the end of the tunnel. I hope to pay off the remaining $23,000 of my debt over the next twenty-four months, liberating myself from what felt over the many years like an economic prison term.

But mine is the story of one of the lucky ones.

I am not the schoolteacher working on a master's trying to earn a raise only to see my salary capped as public education is attacked in the name of austerity.

I am not the newly unemployed worker who got locked into the for-profit college racket in an attempt to get new skills for a handful of available jobs.

I am not a student whose family is trying to finance higher education in the aftermath of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Nor am I the parent who co-signed my child's loan, only to see her struggle to repay her debt, and consequently have my retirement savings wiped out or my Social Security garnished.

No, I am one of the lucky ones. And I know it.

I know it from original research on the student loan debt crisis we did at my organization, One Wisconsin Institute. We're part of the national ProgressNow Education network and a growing national movement to undo student loan debt. Our research shows how the burden of student debt crushes families and drags down the economy.

Here's one example: Where a bachelor's degree used to mean paying off your student loans in fewer than ten years, loan terms in Wisconsin now average eighteen years.

But numbers are numbers. More heartbreaking are the stories sent to us by many of the 3,000 men...