As I was sitting at home on Saturday morning, flipping through the TV channels, I came across Education Sector’s Kevin Carey on C‑SPAN’s Washington Journal. Now, I’m not sure what his main topic was – as I said, I stumbled on him whilst channel surfing – but just as I tuned in he seemed to be offering a stale but unchallenged argument: College student debt is too high, and we know this because there’s no way on his salary a new teacher could comfortably afford to make his monthly debt payments.
Intuitively, my reaction to this all-too-common refrain was “hogwash.” But then, being properly skeptical about all things, including my own knee-jerk reactions, I thought I’d best test out the proposition that a new graduate saddled with an average student debt load couldn’t possibly afford to become a public school teacher.
To run my test, I sketched a rough expense estimate for a new graduate who will be starting off as a first-year teacher in Indianapolis, Indiana, a city I thought seemed like “average” America.
So what would his expenses likely be? Below is a basic list, with bases for estimates:
Monthly Loan Payment: $300. (The State PIRG’s Higher Education Project reports that for a new graduate with $20,000 in debt – roughly the average for a new graduate who has taken out a loan – that must be paid back in 10 years at a 6.8 percent interest, the monthly payment would be $230. For the sake of a “fudge factor,” I boosted the payment to $300.)