Generation Debt

My juniors are starting Walden now, one of my favorite texts we do. It can be tough for the kids to get into, but the ideas there are just so vital, I think. It can be hard for high school students to connect to Walden though, both because of difficult language and because the concerns about how one will make a living can seem awfully distant to 16 and 17 year olds, insulated from "the real world" by another year of high school and four years of college.

We started class today with journal writing, as I asked them to think about where they will be in 10 years and 20 years from now. Then I shared some unfortunate statistics for Americans.

• The average debt after undergraduate study: $17,000
• Heading to med school? Average debt: $130,571 (with a low of $63k and a high of $182k)
• Maybe law school? Average debt: "in excess of $80,000"; at some school the average is as high as $108k.
• Average debt after grad school: $37,000

These graduate programs, incidentally, are in addition to undergraduate study. Students heading off to the elite private colleges and university can expect annual tuition above $40,000, though of course some of that may be covered by scholarships. The point, though, is that there's a lot of opportunity to acquire debt before one even starts working.

Of course, most of my students expect to share in the American dream of home ownership.

• The national average cost of a home: $119,000
• Here in Rhode Island: $133,000
• In the beautiful East Side where our school is located and where many of our students live (me too, though I rent!), a quick survey of houses on the market ran from $200,000 to upwards of $2,000,000.
  
• In another upscale town in Rhode Island (East Greenwich), houses appeared to run from $170,000 to $2.5 or even $3 million

These numbers, of course, are themselves misleading underestimates, since most will be unable to just plunk down the purchase price. Instead, most will have to take out 20- or 30-year mortgages, ultimately paying as much as twice the home's cost, and before it's paid off, many Americans end up owing more than the house is worth. On top of all that, we know from the recent mortgage crisis, we don't really own homes until they're paid, free and clear.
Now, this may seem like awfully heavy to lay on my high schoolers, but there's a point behind it all. The point--Thoreau's point--is that we have alternatives. Most people just blindly stumble into the common way of living, because they don't see any alternative. As Thoreau points out, there are as many ways of living as there are radii from the center of a circle. The point isn't that they should go off and live in a cabin in the woods--though that's not a terrible option--the point is that we need to go into life with our eyes wide open. Do we need to have a bigger house than our co-workers? A huge SUV... or two? All these things have costs, and is it worth, for instance, living our lives in massive debt that will force us to work in our jobs more or less forever whether we enjoy them or not, in order to have a house with more rooms than we can use, a car that's expensive for the sake of being expensive, a thousand dollar suit or a hundred pairs of shoes? We're making choices all the time that impact how much of our lives we will spend working, whether we're aware of them or not. Thoreau would have us be aware of them; he would have us living deliberately.

tags: walden  thoreau  debt  living deliberately  

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