DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

In the course of conducting these interviews, a couple of themes popped up:

 

Little Information

 

The first theme that I noticed was that people were not getting all the information that they needed to take out student loans. One person that I interviewed said “I knew that I had to pay for school somehow, but I couldn’t do it without some sort of help...I wasn’t eligible for any financial aid, and my only option was to take out a loan...I needed money for college, and I got it. Now, I just need to figure out how to pay those loans back.” This was said by Interviewee B, who had a sort of dismay and gloom hanging over his head when he talked directly about his student loans. Interviewee A said “my dad and I had to find some way to pay for college because it was just the two of us. I went to my college and they said that I could take out a student loan. The only problem was that I have to pay it back, and there were all these interest rates and what not.” Interviewee A also stated “when you apply for federal student loans, you have take what they call ‘counseling.’ It is a long, drawn out set of pages that you have to read in order to be able to take out a loan.” Both interviewees needed money and they went to the only the place they thought could help them, the federal government.

 

In Need of a Plan

 

“I know that I will definitely be able to pay back some of my student loans, but I’m not sure how I am going to pay back all of of them.” Interviewee A is planning on going to graduate school after he has attained his Bachelor’s degree, but that just means he has to take out more loans. Interviewee B, on the other hand, was actually ready to pay back his loans. Interviewee B said “I have some money that I’m using to pay back some of my loan now so I don’t have to worry about the whole amount when I get out of school.” On the other end of the spectrum, Interviewee A said that he and his dad are “freaking out a bit because we’re trying to scrounge up what money we can for me to pay back my loans and go to graduate school.” Interviewee B said that he has $20,000 of debt in student loans at the moment, but he expects to have $5,000 more at the time of his graduation. Interviewee A has approximately $23,000 of debt in student loans, and he plans to add on at least another $10,000 during graduate school. Both interviewees have the average student loan debt in the United States, and they will struggle to pay even that back (Taibbi, 2013).

 

Knowledge of the Task at Hand

 

Both interviewees didn’t have much knowledge of what was going on across the country with the millions of other students just like them. Both interviewees knew that a lot of people are in need of loans but they didn’t know why, and they didn’t know that the national student was so high. When told about the national student debt and what has been found in this study so far, both interviewees felt like they had just been woken up. Interviewee A said “I didn’t know that it was this bad. I knew people were struggling to pay back student loans, but I had no idea that it had reached this level. How could this happen?” Interviewee B was in some disbelief, but after showing him other studies on student debt he said that he “felt sick...because this is just insane.”

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.