OH, I HAVE THOUGHTS. (Thread incoming.)

Thanks to scholarships and financial aid, I graduated from a Very Good School (not bragging; it's relevant to the discussion) with a practical degree (in the sciences) and a relatively small debt burden. That practical degree from a... https://twitter.com/caroljsroth/status/1328739904545828864

...Very Good School qualified me for a research position at a prominent medical center that paid precisely $22,763 a year. (You're damn right I remember.) I resided in a shithole apartment with several roommates, ate junk, and drank cheap beer, but it still wasn't much to live...

...on, so I wound up racking up a bunch of credit card debt (do you have any idea how easy it is to get one or two or three of those things?) on luxuries like gas, clothes, groceries, and cheap furniture. Then I got into the medical center's grad program, where I...

...earned a stipend of $18k a year. I say earned because PhD students do the research that keeps the lights on, and work so much, they can't possibly hold down another job. (Thanks to Republicans, that stipend is taxable, by the way.) Hello, additional debt. Naturally, my...

...next move was to get married. We threw it on the cheap, doing everything ourselves, but still added a fair bit to our combined debt. Eventually, I decided that grad program wasn't a great fit for me, so I left and got a job in industry. I paid the school back for the...

...outstanding portion of that year's stipend, which I'd already spent, and moved fifteen hours up the coast—paying for a rental truck, moving supplies, and first/last/security on a tiny basement apartment—for a job that paid $30k a year. (This was in 2001.) I stayed in that...

...job (and apartment, which I was embarrassed to let friends see) for ten years, climbing the ladder, getting incremental raises, and watching our insurance costs balloon. A solid seven or eight of those years were spent eating nothing but cheap, home-cooked food and throwing...

...everything at our debt. Once we finally got clear of it, we bought a modest house—at which point the recession hit, and my company folded. Thankfully, I landed on my feet, but plenty didn't.

To be clear, I'm one of the lucky ones. A success story. A lower-middle-class...

...white kid done good. But do you notice what this thread is missing? Kids, for one. A catastrophic medical emergency, for another. And still, I felt crushed by debt for the entirety of my twenties. Imagine where I'd be if my student loan debt had been twice as large. Or if I...

...had three kids. Or if something major had gone wrong. Or if I'd graduated amid unprecedented unemployment. Or if I had trouble landing a job in my chosen field due to the color of my skin.

Student debt forgiveness isn't a handout, it's an investment. In small businesses...

...and big ideas. In working-class families. In minority communities full of people busting butts to get ahead. In our economy.

I'm proud of my story. Of what my wife and I have accomplished. But I can't help wonder where we'd be if we'd gotten just a little help.

Postscript: I didn't mention my wife's student loan debt because she didn't have any. (She's much smarter than I am. Yay, scholarships!) She also earned more than I did while I was in grad school. We paid down our combined debt together. Yet another way I've been lucky.