Drunken Student Loans

There's student loan assistance for alcoholics in training. Just look to the Natty Light campaign ready to fork over $10 million dollars in student aid. Catch is you have to be young, willing to do a video and drink lots of beer, or buy lots of beer and convince others to drink it. Definitely far too much to cook with. I'm not an alcoholic, I'm not young and I am not photogenic. I'd never heard of Natural Light beer before, I wasn't even sure it was sold in Illinois, until I found cases of it sitting in the corner of a local gas station. I wandered over to the small pile and actually pondered buying a couple cases. It's cheap beer. Still a gamble and I'm also not a gambling person by nature. In the end, I walked away, miffed by the thought that this company is essentially bribing broke students desperate to pay their student loan debt by encouraging them to become alcoholic gamblers. No thanks.

There's student loan assistance for students entering the NHS field. This I can look at as either a bribe to work in the health industry field, or a bribe to enter a field becoming more and more litigious as years creep by. Working in the health industry is fraught with lawsuits, AI taking over where physicians and therapists can no longer touch their patients and patients are getting more frustrated with computers taking over their visits instead of the healthcare provider being wholly present.

You can receive loan forgiveness if you work for the government. We just recently saw how truly detrimental that could be. What happens to those who work for the government, were out of work and have now missed one or two payments? There won't be forgiveness, the agreement gets nullified on one missed payment. No excuses.

Myriads of other programs stick students in low paying jobs while struggling to pay down their debt waiting for forgiveness to kick in. Yet others offer you to trade in your vacation sick days to relieve you of one week salary toward your student loan. While it's better than no help, it's pretty darn close. Those vacations are necessary time off to recharge, rejuvenate and come back to work refreshed and ready to go. Trade those in for a small payment towards your student loan and the detrimental side effects are priceless.

Then we come to my bias: I read how there's a huge struggle engaging more women in the STEM fields. I read and hear in my industry how there's a shortage of cybersecurity professionals, there's STILL a shortage of women in the field and getting students engaged in this growing field is a constant struggle. So where are the employers in cybersecurity offering student loan assistance? Employers who aren't the federal government? Where are the employers who want forensic experience, training and reliability but who also want to support their charges by assisting with the student loan debt incurred to help the industry grow and improve? Certainly not in the headlines trying to make alcoholic gamblers out of today's youth. Not in any headlines.

There isn't much talk about how parent student loans affect their children either. Even though I have crushing student debt, her financial aid won't take that into consideration. Nor will scholarship applications. Those points are blind to the fact that 1/3 of my income will be going to pay my own loans. No, to apply for scholarships or aid, the only thing taken into consideration is my income as a whole. So now my child suffers because I wanted a higher education to provide better. How fair is this? How encouraging is this to the youth of today that want to better their futures with an education? I would say, not very, as a matter of fact it's fairly stifling. Much like the entire student debt fiasco.

Sincerely,

A Student Loaned (Eina)