College days and college debt

As many of my old high school friends and crowd descended into mid to late 90s partying - "stoned and dethroned," run-ins with the law, rowdy punk concerts at rundown bowling alleys and otherwise, to quote British police "general insolence" - I, once described as a rebellious teen with a good heart but without a relative in a trade to be ushered into (my first choice), instead thoroughly enjoyed college days.

They started in the late '90s at COD and then on to a bachelors at North Central College to late 2000s grad school at NIU, offering me an inspiring, enlightening and stimulating haven from the confusing post-high school suburban noise.

Though I was a bad student historically and undisciplined to the core at first, my mind budded in college with a thirst for history. It offered more stories you know, philosophy, Spanish, poetry and artistic sensibility. I still love Wallace Stevens Professor Hilda, political theory and social movements - really anything I could absorb besides math and science (humanities major here).

I don't know if my dear former farmworker father with an eighth-grade education had ever read a book cover to cover in his life. Maybe that's why I walked around with stacks of them, loved their smell and loved walking to class on wispy-winded, fall days over a carpet of yellow leaves, with the future in my heart, a red backpack on my shoulders (sacrifice) and my graphing calculator in my pocket - pre iPhone days, thankfully.

There were trying times, too: the 2008 NIU Valentine's Day massacre taking place in the building next to where I was supposed to be (I had missed class that day); deciding on whether of not to make the drive to grad school night classes with both my wallet and gas tank empty, baby daughter crying in the background, only with hope that a classmate would "spot me" (they usually did); and ultimately more importantly as part of the first generation in my family to go to college, not knowing what to do financially, where to seek student aid, what student aid to seek.

Of course, there were the student loan companies public and private waiting for me. Just fill an easy form. I graduated owing over $125,000 in student loan debt. The night of my master's degree ceremony in 2008 I was handed a handsome leather portfolio and inside not my degree, but a note to talk immediately with the bursar's office.

Come on. I still haven't received my actual, physical degrees years later from either NCC or NIU, though part of it is to blame on finding the time to pursue this - and how pedal to the metal it's been since graduating college as a Gen Xer in 2008 with the Great Recession waiting for me; two daughters and the unceremonious move of my parents to south Texas in 2004 while I was studying abroad in Costa Rica finishing my bachelor's degree, swooping up my childhood home. Though area landlords have been happy to receive my years of rent money. it's been work-study-but especially work for me since I was 23.

The Supreme Court last month blocked a measure that would have provided limited relief for 43 million Americans like me, suffering under a crushing collective debt burden of $1.7 trillion in outstanding federal student loans.

Though the executive order by President Biden last August fell short of his 2020 pledge to forgive all federal student loans, Biden's plan would have canceled up to $10,000 in loan principal for borrowers earning up to $125,000 a year, and up to $20,000 for recipients of Pell Grants for low-income students. It could have added up to $400 billion in loan forgiveness over 30 years, or $13.3 billion a year, which pales in comparison to our $1 trillion-a-year military budget, not to mention the seemingly bottomless funds allocated to arm Ukraine in the war against Russia.

Justice Roberts decried the "overreach," the so-called "administrative state" and cited the "major questions" doctrine that is used to sideline federal regulations that impinge on profits of the corporate elite.

I'm currently signed up with semi-reasonable income-driven payment plan that, as a nonprofit worker, will be forgiven after 10 years, but the debt I have, currently at $150,000 today after years of forbearances as I struggled to launch Immigrant Solidarity Dupage while tutoring Spanish on the side, has kept me, now that my income is stabilizing, from a) buying a house b) having good credit and c) imagining a post-student debt future.

But I still vaguely imagine a future without the overwhelming student loan and other debt crippling me and my mates - Gen Xers the first generation to be financially worse off than their parents, in terms of retirement, wealth accumulation, cost of living, and upward mobility and hold about six times more debt than their parents did at the same age. Ugh. But it's going to take our nation's priorities being re-imagined, radically.

• Cristóbal Cavazos, of Wheaton, a member of the Daily Herald editorial sounding board, is co-founder of Immigrant Solidarity DuPage and an activist for the Latino community in Chicago's Western suburbs.