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I’m a bit of an untraditional case when it comes to student loans.
My wife and I met in graduate school where we were both working towards MAs in English. In 2007 she graduated, and I left the program without a degree. We moved to Chicago where we both got jobs. I was teaching and she was working with a website. In 2008 I lost my job and was unemployed until 2011. Thankfully, we didn’t have much debt from the first round of school and managed to pay it off (about 15K total). There’s a weird generational thing where when we first went to school it was like you can major in anything and get a job, but then we left graduate school right as the worst recession in our lifetimes to that point was starting. What the crash and the recession afterward really cemented was that in this modern economy you need to keep refreshing your skills (though I worry at some point I’ll end up overqualified). So, once I got a job after being unemployed, I realized I needed to learn more stuff within the framework of that job and that agency. The problem is education is expensive. I started taking classes at a community college and in 2014 I started an MBA which I graduated from and then did an MA in Economics where I graduated last year. My wife did a post-graduate certificate program for her work and is looking to extend that for her second Masters. We’ve been employed and taking out loans and then paying them as we go but still owe close to 30K.
