> ...Cathy grew up in Minnesota and attended the University of Minnesota, after which she enrolled in law school.
The history glides over what Cathy majored in at the University of Minnesota.
Can anyone guess what her undergraduate major was? More importantly, why was her undergraduate major not noted in the story?
One is led to suspect that her undergraduate major was in the “liberal arts.” This could have been “strike one” in her career path.
She decided to rescue herself by attending law school during evenings. Another invented character Saul Goodman did this and survived, but it took hard work and dedication. There is another route which is to become a paralegal first. Typically large law firms offer this path. The state AG office did not? I think something is missing from the story, a reason why she did not become a paralegal while at that job. Whatever it was, it was strike two.
strike three was overextending herself with two years of tuition at a law school with the risk that she would not finish.
Strike four was an apparent lack of a marriage partner who could help provide a financial cushion in the case of a career plan failure or at least career counseling well grounded in reality.
Life is actually like a baseball game in which you must score a hit or lose at your first time at bat. strikeouts are usually rewarded with poverty and bankrupcy, not another chance at bat later in the game.
Finally, let’s posit the same story, but the change the gender of the protagonist from female to male; from Cathy to Carl.
Would the story elicit the same amount of sympathy from the average reader?
I would posit in the negative. The reason is that Carl not having a good paying job is in modern American culture perceived as a failure and the failure is perceived as his own fault. Carl could always find a good paying job working in (for example) sheetrock (that is, a trade).
A trade job would have in theory been open to Cathy. she was born one year before the Pill became available and came of age roughly at the same time as women’s lib. Any job a man can do a woman can do, or so our culture now tells us, right? So, Cathy could have worked sheetrock to make more money but she chose to stay in a (lower paying, future-limited) office job.
Strike five.
I am led to conclude that the story is a manipulative tear-jerking incompletely described or manufactured character.
I imagine that there are many people out there who have been screwed by our government (IMHO starting with the Clinton era) and our collective cultural fiction of unfulfilled promises to our younger generation, and who deserve our sympathy. But Cathy seems more to me like a semi-fictional character aimed at generating political support for a policy (college debt forgiveness) which for Cathy at least may have been a bad idea to begin with.
On college debt, in my opinion, universities should be made like Germany. You go there to study, that’s it. No fancy sport teams or scholarships, no luxury dormitories.