Research Blog 8: Interview

I interviewed my roommate Meghan about the impact of privatized student loans on an individual's mental health. I chose to speak with her because of the struggles she has experienced with anxiety and finances since I have lived with her. Through our interview, it appears that Meghan is a prime example of a student loan victim. She pays for her own education via students loans suggested to her through the Rutgers student aid office, and incurs multiple other monthly expenses associated with renting a home (ie. rent, food, gas/electric, water, internet, phone). She stated that she works two part time jobs during the week in addition to a 12 credit course load. During the course of our conversation, her nervousness and anxiety in regards to her finances were evidenced through statements such as, "I work 35 hours a week for what? $250 at the end of that week? That doesn't even begin to make a dent in the kind of debt I'm dealing with." Meghan additionally mentioned that the amount of time she spends at work has affected her performance in school. Despite being a third year college student, Meghan has only accumulated 33 credits. She says, "I just don't know how they can expect us to keep up with school when some of us have to work huge amounts of hours just to cover our day to day expenses, forget long term payments. I've failed classes just because my professor's don't want to give me an extension when I have a lot of hours at work. But I need that money, so I guess there's not much I can do." This example of Meghan's performance in school perfectly illustrates Pedersen's concept of stress carry-over whereby stress in one area of life impacts another aspect of life. However, her financial anxiety has impacted her in other non-academic ways as well. After her first year of college, Meghan mentioned that she began drinking to excess which in turn led to a semester of failed courses. She explains, "the stress of it all just became too much. It was much easier to just have a good time and not think about it". This provides another great example of stress carry-over where Meghan's financial anxieties affected Meghan's mental health leading to substance abuse which in turn negatively impacted her academic performance. The last point that Meghan made in our interview regarded campus academic and student counseling services. After being put on academic probation for a semester and meeting with an advisor regarding her academic performance, she was given a referral to the campus's counseling services to speak with a counselor to manage her stress. This particular experience illuminates the concept of stress individuation. The current practices in place to help students manage with stress, much of which stems from finances (in this case in particular), do not address the root of the problem but instead individualize the problem and position the stress and anxiety ridden individuals as what Hacker has termed, personal responsibility crusaders.

Prior to researching the topic of student loan privatization and the effects it has on an individual's mental health, I did not realize how relevant this topic was to virtually every individual's college experience. Not only did I not realize how wide spread this problem is, but I did not realize that it would effect someone so close to me. Meghan has experienced many of the ramifications of student loan privatization that I have encountered through my research and provides a prime example of why privatization along with it's high interest rates and corrupt practices should be exposed and reformed.

Research Blog 7: My Case

Default: The Student Loan Documentary

Relevant Links:

Default: The Student Loan Documentary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvQR93C6n2E

The Proposal to Forgive Student Loan Debt:

http://www.forgivestudentloandebt.com/content/proposal

To frame my argument about the relationship between higher education privatization and experiences of stress, anxiety and depression in college students, I will look closely at the film Default: The Student Loan Documentary. This film examines the current state of the student loan industry and the resulting economic and personal stress experienced by student borrowers. Student loan experts, activists and borrowers come together in this film to chronicle the life of privatization from its advent through modern day in an effort to expose the true culprit of the financial stress experienced by college attendees and graduates. Default ties in many of the themes that I have discovered thus far in my research. Most prominently, this film addresses the widespread personal responsibility shift that has occurred through the passage of Acts such as the Higher Education Act of 1968 and the Bankruptcy Abuse and Consumer Protection Act. As Lauren Asher, President of The Institute for College Access and Success explains, students from low income families attending college during America's Golden Age would have been able to graduate from college with no debt by working only a minimum wage job part-time during the semester and full-time during the summer, while that same student today would have to borrow private loans to make their way through college today. This film will be useful in providing multiple specific cases which illustrate the devastating effects of the private loan industry. From Matt who owes more than $200,000 in student loan debt and has experienced stress carry-over into his personal romantic relationships, to Gregory who worked three part-time jobs each semester of college and still graduated with $30,000 in student loan debt, and Jelisa who was awarded two different government grants, works a part-time job during the semester, and still needed student loans only to graduate in $60,000+ in student loan debt, it becomes clear through this documentary that the root cause of this issue does not lie in any deficit of the individual, but in a corrupt loan system. Lastly, this documentary offers compelling ways to solve this student loan crisis. Methods such as "outing yourself" involve vocalizing the financial stress experienced by individuals in an effort to highlight the socio-systemic cause of financial stress, while grass roots movements allow students the opportunity to advocate for their own causes and beliefs. But perhaps the most radical of solutions was proposed by Robert who wrote The Proposal to Forgive All Student Loan Debt. While this proposal did not pass congress, it provides an interesting an interesting viewpoint on the ways our loan dollars could be put to use if not lied up in the student loan industry. While I am not yet sure how I will incorporate The Proposal into my argument, I have attached the link for further consideration. 

Research Blog 6

This table comes from Daphne Pedersen's study "Stress Carry Over and College Student Health Outcomes". It is helpful in illustrating her theory of "stress carry over" and the types of types of stress that are the most prominent, and most likely to affect other areas of an individuals life. From this graph we see that school carry-over outweighs all other types of carry-over bringing us to the conclusion that the college experience is the most stressful aspect of a college-aged individuals life. This will be helpful in strengthening my argument that stress among college students is increasing, and that their stress stems from the increasing expectations of them set forth by Privatization. 

This chart comes from a PDF distributed to students at the University of Illinois at Chicago by the campus Wellness Center and is designed to give students an empirical evaluation of their stress levels. Students were tasked with tallying points received based on different categories of stress they have experienced within the past three months. A stress score of over 300 signaled a need to visit the Wellness Center for counseling. This chart and the attached pdf is helpful in reinforcing Dana Becker's assertion that stress among college students has been individualized instead of being though of as a social health problem as this chart is meant to determine and individual diagnosis for individual treatment.