Today’s political climate is about reform & bailouts. It seems there are many things we wish to reform, and corporations and industries we want to bailout. Health care, banking, mortgages, credit cards. We want to help the downtrodden, the abused the individuals who are unable to help themselves.
I present to you a segment of people that desperately need help. No one listens to them because their situation isn’t camera-worthy. They are a group of individuals who tend to be stoic because crying on national television isn’t professional. It isn’t befitting of a lawyer to cry poor-mouth. Doctors who have no money have clearly made poor life decisions or blown their big paycheck on something they shouldn’t have.
I present to you the young professional with an advanced degree. The highly educated, poorly paid, loaned to the max ex-graduate student. The person who owes institutions hundreds of thousands of dollars, the segment of the population being told that they need to hurry up because a nation depends on them, the person who was told that one day it would all be worth it.
One day isn’t here yet. Instead of one day the recent-graduate professional who lives across the hall, down the street and in your neighborhood is looking at student loan repayment plans & the grocery list & deciding which one to cut. Sure it isn’t as heart breaking as the single Mom who is choosing between heat and food, but I offer to you the theory that this growing problem is going to lead to problems just as big.
We are a nation that needs lawyers, doctors, engineers, nurses, physician assistants, physicists and biologists. We are a nation that demands these individuals have the background & knowledge to fight for civil rights, cure cancer, take care of your family member on hospice, and to fix the broken bridge between your house and your office. We demand perfection out of these people- we want the lawyers to put the Dahmer’s & Madoff’s in prison, to stand up to the big corporations and to make sure that the leagelese in your mortgage isn’t going to come back to bite you in a year. You want your doctors to make flawless incisions, to solve your oozing wounds, failing hearts and broken bones. You want them to do it with compassion and you want them to do it the right way with no mistakes. You want biologists in laboratories to cure cancer, heart disease, to find a pill to help you lose weight and you want it without swelling, hair loss, complications or stress on your other internal organs. You want engineers to create green buildings, fix crumbling infrastructure and you want them to make it look good in the process.
This type of knowledge isn’t inherent. This type of knowledge requires years and years of schooling. Some people get scholarships, have parents who help pay their way, or land jobs with those magical six figure salaries. The type of lawyer and doctor and chemist with a shiny office and smart suits, who dine at the best restaurants on their one night off and have people approach them to thank them for saving their home, their mother or the enviornmental nightmare that was brewing at their child’s school.
The rest of these highly educated cogs go home to noodles & delinquent bills. Those high paying jobs are few and far between, and in this economy we lose them by the day. The image of the doctor with 2.3 kids and a shiny BMW should come with a tag: “Caution, these results are not typical.”
The houses of higher education- law schools, medical schools, graduate programs and the like show you their succesful alumni. They show you graduates who did something big, who drive big shiny cars and make a difference in the world. The bury your student loan paperwork in glossy brochures of smiling professionals and impressive credentials, they shake your hand with a hand covered in expensive jewelry and they make jokes about enjoying the free pizza for a few years. They smooth over the details, they use words like potential, and making a difference and they fill you with an idea that you too are going to join the ranks of people who helped. They show you alumni employment statistics and they don’t define employment- and when you graduate they send emails begging you to “turn in” your classmates who haven’t filled out their post-graduation employment survey, they cajole you with the statement that “Even if you are teaching yoga or tending bar or waiting tables or working in retails, you are employed!*” If you refuse on principal they laugh & remind you that if you refuse & help to lower that “alumni employment statistic” then you are devaluing the degree you depend on for employment. Now please, just write that check for $38,000 for the year- books, room & board, living expenses and groceries not included.
Those of us with this education & lack of spectacular employment are fighting tooth & nail for jobs that under-utilize our talents and pay us less than the jobs we had waiting tables in college. We didn’t go to Harvard & we didn’t graduate in the tip-top of our class but we were told that we were vital and that it was going to pay for itself one day. Instead we live in cramped apartments, parents basements and with roommates. We’ve incurred hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt & obtained an education that as it turns out, no one can compensate us for. We yearn to pioneer into courts, operating rooms & laboratories, but as it turns out no one can pay us to do so. We can bankroll ourselves but no one wants to take a risk on the untested newbie. Not with their precious dollars. In today’s economy the only thing worth paying for is a sure thing, and a young lawyer or engineer is bound to make mistakes. Mistakes cost money and there isn’t a penny to spare.
I cried to a bank representative today. I explained that I want to pay this loan, that I have no intention of defaulting, but my job doesn’t pay enough money to buy groceries, keep the lights on and make this payment right now. They shrug, they tell me I signed on the line, and they make a gamble by creating repercussions that they know will scare the average educated soul into cutting them a check. They don’t care what doesn’t get paid if they get paid and they make the ramifications bigger than the problem of under-employement.
Greedy. The banks that were willing to take the money from a family that couldn’t afford that picture-perfect house have found a new stream of income. Why push people to pay credit cards when they have highly educated newbies to press on? Surely this newly-minted attorney can come up with a few hundred dollars a month. Of course a physician can afford to pay us immediately. At the end of the day, they can’t trick a lawyer with a page full of words, but they can make sure that they ruin a career before it even starts. Would you hire an attorney being hounded by a collection agency? Would you trust a doctor who couldn’t pay their bills? No. The banks bank on an individual with a title doing anything to prevent that nightmare of a scenario and they do it by threatening the very image they paid for. They threaten to undermine your integrity, ethics, your decision making process and the multitude of skills that form a foundation of professionalism.
At the end of the day the bank threatens to take away the benefits of the degree that they funded. And something seems inherently wrong with this picture. The picture that isn’t pretty enough for Capital Hill, the President, your Governor or your Dean to care about. Helping the “big fish” isn’t popular and doesn’t win you an election - and until there are no big fish left, I fear this situation is only getting worse.
*Excerpt from an actual email I received from my law school’s alumni affairs office
