Know about student debt before digging out: Your Say

Letter to the editor:

After reading Paste BN reporter Hadley Malcolm’s tongue-in-cheek column about her experiences with student loans, I would like to offer a rebuttal from the heart (“The unexpected upside of student loan debt,” Voices).

As a retired college teacher, I have always been incensed by the unconscionable burden placed on our young people by our federal student loan program. There surely must be a better way than for these young people, who represent our hope, to incur debt that in many cases will last a lifetime!

As an experienced mathematics and computer science teacher, I do know that there are much better ways to teach financial management.

John D. Prejean; New Hope, Minn.

Comments from Facebook are edited for clarity and grammar:

It is all about managing money, be it a car payment, student loan or mortgage. Malcolm gets it. First, she kept the amount down to a manageable level, and second, she knows the value of getting loans paid off as quickly as possible.

I know people in their 50s who still haven’t gotten this yet. They will be going into retirement with crushing debt and little or nothing saved.

— Sharon McGovern

Some people don’t like the idea of saying no to going out, or not taking vacations in order to pay off student loan debt.

— Ronald Garay