Are student loans an investment or a burden?

Growing up, I was taught to fear student debt — even when I didn’t truly understand what it was. This lesson didn’t really come from my parents, who worked full time to pay their way through school, but from the horror stories of twenty-something-year-olds haunted by six-figure debt that so often appeared in the news. As I’ve continued my education, these stories have appeared to increase in both frequency and urgency. I often manage to convince myself that this is probably due to my own hyperawareness, but it does seem as though the coverage surrounding the student-debt epidemic is at an all-time high.

The majority of this coverage paints a grim picture, detailing the growing amount of students defaulting on their loans and a record-high number of adults over 60 co-signing on these loans and struggling to repay their own portion. It’s easy to breeze over the statistics, financial jargon and clinical tone, leaving you with little indication of what it all means for you.

Leading up to college, no one in my high school really talked about debt, as it was assumed that the few kids attending pricey out-of-state schools would be funded entirely by their parents. It was still an abstract concept when an admissions slideshow for one of those out-of-state schools presented the $60,000 annual price tag, surrounded by seemingly arbitrary breakdowns of additional living expenses.

I knew it was a lot of money and breathed a sigh of relief when I realized I could essentially attend UF for free through a combination of Florida Bright Futures and Florida Prepaid. In retrospect, attending UF was the smartest financial decision I could’ve made, even though I merely stumbled into that decision by chance.

I knew attending graduate school would be expensive. But again, it remained an abstract concept even as I researched and compared tuition and cost-of-living expenses. Now, as seat deposit deadlines loom closer, the reality of taking on debt before I even enter the professional world is, well, terrifying.

That terror is blatantly apparent on the law school admissions forums (also known as Dante’s 10th circle of hell), as clueless college students seek counsel from equally clueless college students on how much debt they can and should incur. The answer is almost invariably that no one knows for sure, it’s merely a matter of how much risk one wants to take.

Last semester, I wrote a column about the shift in discourse surrounding education that increasingly characterizes it as a capitalist endeavor. Continuing with that school of thought, one can choose to see student loans as an investment in your own earning potential. Like all investments, it carries a certain amount of risk, risk that law school graduates five years ago were forced to reckon with through declining job prospects.

A few weeks ago, I sat in on a law class at a school I was visiting and eventually began to discuss my admissions process with the professor. When I mentioned how scholarship offers would play a pivotal role in my decision, he stated, “It used to be that students would just go to the highest ranked school, now all they seem to care about is money.” Whether this is a sign of heightened financial sensibility or just rising costs of education remains uncertain, it’s obvious that many of us are simply aware of the risk and trying to mitigate it.

Marisa Papenfuss is a UF English senior. Her column appears on Tuesdays.