By that spring, college was all I could focus on. Ever since I’d been a little girl, I had wanted to be a teacher. And no one gets to be a teacher without a college degree.
For weeks, nothing turned up. Friends were getting their acceptances and starting to talk about which dorms they would live in or what majors they would declare. And I kept going home for lunch.
One day I dashed out of history class the instant the bell rang. As I came around the corner onto our street, I saw the red flag up on the mailbox, signaling that we had mail. Inside lay two fat envelopes, one on top of the other. I stood in our front yard and tore into each one. The first letter was from Northwestern. The university was offering me a scholarship, a work-study job, and a student loan. I quickly did the calculations and saw that I would still need to come up with maybe another $1,000 or so each year—an amount I could just about cover with a summer job. This was it: I could go to college. For sure.
Then I ripped open the second letter, from George Washington University, and—wow!—it was offering a full scholarship and a federal loan. That was all I needed to know: then and there I decided to become a GW Colonial. I had never seen either school, and I didn’t know how I’d get to Washington or where I would live, but even so, I was headed to GW!
I sprung it on my parents that night. They already knew about the applications, but no one had said anything for months. We’d all been waiting, just tiptoeing around until the news came in. Now I was dancing around the kitchen big-time, waving the forms and talking about the humongous size of the scholarship (or, at least, that’s how it seemed at the time). Daddy grinned. Good on you, punkin.
Mother was more shocked, but she recovered. College—and a way to pay for it—was now possible. Within days, she told every grandparent, aunt, uncle, cousin, neighbor, grocer, dry cleaner, preacher, and person she met on the street that I was going to college. She always noted that she didn’t want me to go so far away, then explained, “Betsy figured out how to go to college for free, so what could I say?” I think she invented humblebragging before others perfected it into a fine art.
And just in case I was about to get a swelled head, she usually added, even with the news about the scholarship, “But I don’t know if she’ll ever get married.”
On Labor Day weekend before I headed back for my junior year at GW, my first boyfriend (and the first boy to dump me) dropped back into my life. He was now twenty-two, a college grad with a good job, and evidently he had decided it was time to get married. He proposed, and about a nanosecond later, I said yes. At nineteen, I said hello, housewife; good-bye, college. It was definitely not the smartest move I ever made.
Me as a college student, ready to take on the world.
But I was living in a time of second chances, and I got lucky again. Even a girl shortsighted enough to give up a full scholarship could get back in the game. Before long, I was back in school, hitting the books at a commuter college that cost $50 a semester. This was an education I could pay for on a part-time waitressing job. I saw that chance, and this time I was smart enough to grab it with both hands and hold on for dear life.
Two years later, I got my first job teaching special-needs kids.
COLLEGE IS THE way up—at least, that’s what we believe. For me, college was a chance to fly.
But for today’s college students, flying is a whole lot harder. Every time I talk with a college student today, I’m reminded of how lucky I was and how much has changed since I was stutter-stepping my way toward a college degree all those years ago.
I was introduced to Kai through a friend. In October 2016, we agreed to meet at a restaurant within walking distance from my house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Kai was in her late twenties. As she stood up from the table to say hello, I was struck by her eyes. She was lively and interested in everything around her. She commented on the restaurant, the menu, the silverware, the dishes, the light in the room, the drawings on the wall—and that was only in the first five minutes. Tall and dark-haired, she was an impressive young woman, the kind who could take on the world and succeed anywhere.
She was more than willing to tell me her story, but she didn’t want me to use her real name because she was embarrassed about how things had turned out. We agreed that I’d also change some details of her story to protect her privacy.
Kai grew up in Colorado. Even as a kid, she’d had a plan about her future. Her dad was a firefighter, and they loved spending time together playing computer games. It was their time. She explained that she had been playing video games “since as long as I could walk.” She knew she wanted to create those games.
Kai was interested in what she saw on the screen, but as she learned more about the science and art underneath those graphics, her interests expanded. From ATMs to airline check-in kiosks to advanced medical imaging equipment, front-end designers are now walking people through more than just games; they now lead people through events across our economy. Kai knew that if she got the right education, she could land a career in a field she had been training for since her daddy lifted her up for her first game.
Neither of Kai’s parents had gone to college, and she didn’t get college counseling from anyone in her high school. She was pretty much on her own to figure out what would be the right school. She didn’t want to study art theory in a big lecture hall. Instead, she wanted hands-on work and sophisticated training that would prepare her for a real job.
Kai worked hard in school, but that wasn’t enough.
When she saw a TV commercial for the Art Institutes, a nationwide system of art schools, she thought, “This is it!” The promotional materials were amazing. “One of the deciding factors for me choosing to attend the Art Institute,” she explained, “was its focus on being a ‘career college’ that didn’t deal with the typical four-year-college experience driven by fraternities or social events.”
Kai now blasted off full speed ahead. “I wanted to be surrounded by professional artists and designers, all aiming for the common goal of making it into the industry with focus and determination,” she told me. Her older sister lived outside Seattle, so Kai worked out a way to move in with her and save on expenses when she enrolled in the Art Institute of Seattle (AIS). She was ready to take on the world.
Kai’s first two years in college were a lot tougher than mine. She got up at five o’clock every morning to catch a ferry to Seattle and then ride a bus to the school. She saw two years of sunrises, but she never complained about the early hours or the long commute. She was a little uneasy about whether she was learning the cutting-edge material prominently featured in the promotional materials, but she loved being around computers and working with graphics. To support herself, she worked part-time at Barnes & Noble. Even so, she kept her priorities straight. She attended every class and did every scrap of homework. Kai was proud of her 3.9 GPA, and she was determined to keep it up.
Sometimes on those long commutes, Kai thought about her finances. She knew she could do the classwork at AIS, but by the time she reached the two-year mark, she had already run up $45,000 in student loans. That was a lot of money.
Early in Kai’s third year, the whole thing came crashing down. The Art Institute of Seattle wasn’t like the state schools back home. It was one of fifty college campuses around the country owned by a multi-billion-dollar corporation. That corporation, Education Management Corporation, and its highly paid executives were looking to haul in big bucks for themselves and their investors by scooping up Kai’s federal student loan money.
Kai hadn’t known it when she’d started out as a freshman, but the Art Institutes were in trouble. Complaints