Stories 8

"
I am a professor at a State University, an eligible PSLF employer, at which I have taught full-time for the past 19 years.

I was the first in my family to attend college. My mother was a single mom and I left for my first day of college in September 1986 from a New York City public housing project. I was determined to break a cycle of poverty and saw higher education as the way to do that. I did not know my father and when I entered NYU, my mother earned less than the school’s annual tuition. I was, in other words, solely responsible for financing my college education. Towards the end of my undergraduate years, I decided to pursue a career as a professor of history, a path that required a total of 12 years of full-time study. I received my Ph.D. in 1998.

During this time, I had married my husband of now 28 years. We are the blessed parents of seven children. As we pursued careers while raising a large family, we did everything we could to simplify our lives. This included consolidating our loans in December 2001, combining Joe’s $8,000 debt non-forgivable debt with my much larger $74,000 – now theoretically forgivable - burden for a total of $82,000. As of today, we have paid over $100,000 in interest and more than $33,000 in principal. We have not missed a payment 23 years. In spite of this sacrifice and commitment, without your help we will continue to pay on this loan until 2033, when I will be 65 years old.

Our responsibility to repayment has meant that we have struggled for years as we support a large family in New York City, one of the most expensive regions of the country. All seven children live at home and, although Joe and I make respectable salaries, we still live paycheck-to-paycheck, with no cash margin to provide a buffer should we encounter a financial emergency. We have lived responsibly and, thankfully, have been able to avert financial crises over the past three decades. But the stress and worry of encountering a hardship outside of our control has been, and continues to be, enormous.

"

~Dawn