Chad Haag with his wife at their wedding this year.
Posted on 10/27/2018 4:44:26 PM PDT by Simon Green
Chad Haag considered living in a cave to escape his student debt. He had a friend doing it. But after some plotting, he settled on what he considered a less risky plan. This year, he relocated to a jungle in India. "I've put America behind me," Haag, 29, said.
He now lives in a concrete house in the village of Uchakkada for $50 a month. His backyard is filled with coconut trees and chickens. "I saw four elephants just yesterday," he said, adding that he hopes to never set foot in a Walmart again.
His debt is currently on its way to default. But more than 9,000 miles away from Colorado, Haag said, his student loans don't feel real anymore.
"It's kind of like, if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, does it really exist?" he said.
The philosophy major concedes that his student loan balance of around $20,000 isn't as large as the burden shouldered by many other borrowers, but he said his difficultly finding a college-level job in the U.S. has made that debt oppressive nonetheless. "If you're not making a living wage," Haag said, "$20,000 in debt is devastating."
He struggled to come up with the $300 a month he owed. The first work he found after he graduated from the University of Northern Colorado in 2011 — when the recession's effects were still palpable — was on-again, off-again hours at a factory, unloading trucks and constructing toy rockets on an assembly line. He then went back to school to pursue a master's degree in comparative literature at the University of Colorado Boulder. After that, he tried to make it as an adjunct professor, but still he could barely scrape a living together with the one class a semester he was assigned.
Haag had some hope restored when he landed full-time work as a medical courier in Denver, delivering urine and blood samples to hospitals. However, he was disappointed to find that he brought home just $1,700 a month. He had little money left over after he paid his student loan bill. He couldn't afford an apartment in the city, where rents have been rising sharply. He lived with his mother and rarely went out with friends.
"I couldn't make the math work in America," Haag said. Milestones that seemed like pipe dreams back home, like starting a family, and owning a house, are now on his horizon. This year he married an Indian citizen, a professor at a local college. He now has a five-year spousal visa, and plans to renew it when the time comes.
Adjusting to a new country, he admitted, has not been entirely easy. "Some toilets here are holes in the ground you squat over," Haag said. Recently, he ate spoiled goat meat at a local restaurant and landed in the emergency room.
Still, he said, "I have a higher standard of living in a Third World country than I would in America, because of my student loans."
Or maybe drive a truck.It’s boring work but it pays well.
It cost only $20,000 to get rid of this turd?
Money well spent, I say!
My year tuition at Ohio State Univ-—1968.....READY????
oNE YEAR-—$375.00
fOR gRAD SCHOOL I WORKED PART TIME CLEANING HOUSES.
stop govt loans!!!...except for medical school and engineering and computer science......( they pay back,ha)..and we need them! ha.
“I wonder what he does for a living now to afford the $50 rent?
Teaches philosophy”
But,he’s still short $25.00 of making the rent. He has to collect elephant dung to sell to fertilizer manufacturers.
But,he was lucky and saw 4 elephants the other day.
Mooches off his overweight Indian wife who’s working up the courage to tell him she wants a green card? Wow did she get a winner.
And the black girl who moved to Japan and expected to assimilate. Uh...
High School Guidance Counselors have been complicit in the everybody should go to college nonsense.
__________
It’s the best way to indoctrinate students and keep professors with strange and useless majors employed.
A friend of mine worked the cafeteria counter at Woolworth’s while going to college. He was BSing with some guys making a delivery, and the driver asked him what his major was. I think it was library science with a minor in philosophy, or maybe it was philosophy, at that point. The driver called out to the guy unloading the truck with a dolly, and said “Tell him What degree you have. “ Dude said “Master’s in philosophy. “
A fast web search says a one way plane ticket to India is more than a thousand dollars, more than 3 months of payments and 5%+ of his loan balance.
If he couldn’t pay the payments, how did he pay for a plane ticket? Or did he ditch that debt, too?
You can thank the Warren Supreme Court (via the 1971 Griggs vs. Duke Power decision) for forcing companies to use a college degree as proof of competency, as it ruled that intelligence testing as a condition of hire was discriminatory.
Those are the political officer jobs social justice graduates expect to get, whether in academia, government or for big businesses.
ACADEMIC FAST FOOD
I am starting an “Academic Fast Food” restaurant.
Young adults get to come in and eat all they want for free.
You can eat free for 4 years.
The Government will subsidize the loans.
But after 4 years, you need to pay back the Government,
about $50,000 for use of the service.
They shall put the borrower on a payment plan for 8 years.
Oh and the price of fast food shall skyrocket.
Just vote for me, TheNext, this election, I got clever plans.
That was why I have no problem with the universities being forced to disgorge profits/endowments to pay off the student loans. It would force a lot of Lefty perfessers to find a real job.
Bill Bennett’s degree is in Philosophy. He hasn’t done too bad.
Yep, agree
Bill Bennett has a brain and work ethic; he would have done well if he majored in tiddlywinks.
How would you know?
Guess they skip right on over ethics in that philosophy department.
Hahah now that’s funny! Another take on tte situation
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