My nephew Jonathan graduated from the University of South Carolina about five years ago with a degree in computer science. Good school. Practical major. He did everything you’re supposed to do.
He also graduated with over $125,000 in student loans.
That number still stops me when I think about it. A hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. For a bachelor’s degree. At a state school. In-state tuition.
Some of that money paid for tuition and fees. Some paid for housing. Some covered the cost of just being alive while going to school full-time. And some of it came through Parent PLUS loans that his mom co-signed.
Jonathan’s mom is a single mother. She was barely making ends meet when he started college. But she wanted her son to have a shot at something better, so she signed.
Neither of them really understood what they were agreeing to.
I think about Jonathan a lot when I’m working on this project. Because his story isn’t about someone who made bad choices. It’s about someone who made the choices the system told him to make, without the information he needed to understand what those choices would cost.
When Jonathan was seventeen or eighteen, sitting down with that stack of loan paperwork, what did he actually know?
Did he understand how interest works? Not just the number, but what it means when interest compounds over years? Did anyone help him calculate what his monthly payment would be after graduation? Did anyone compare that number to what a computer science graduate actually earns and ask whether the math made sense?
I’m pretty sure the answer is no. Not because the adults around him didn’t care. Because they didn’t know either.
His mom wanted to help her son go to college. That’s what you’re supposed to do as a parent. The Parent PLUS loans were the tool the system gave her. Some of that money helped keep her own household afloat while Jonathan was in school, because that’s how tight things were.
She wasn’t gaming anything. She was just trying to survive while giving her kid a chance.
But nobody told her those loans would sit on her credit report for years. Nobody explained that she’d be fully responsible if payments got missed. Nobody helped her see how this one decision would limit her options for a long time.
She’s still renting. She’s in her fifties, and homeownership isn’t really on the table. Part of that is the Parent PLUS loans. Part of it is everything else that comes with being a single mom who never had much margin to begin with.
She tried to do right by her son. Now both of their financial futures are constrained by a decision they made together when he was barely an adult.
Five years out from graduation, Jonathan is still struggling to make minimum payments on his debt. The COVID payment pauses helped for a while, but the loans didn’t disappear. They’re still there, shaping what he can and can’t do.
And here’s the thing that gets me: he did everything right. State school. Computer science. Graduated. This isn’t a story about a kid who dropped out or got a degree in something impractical. He checked all the boxes.
It still wasn’t enough.
I see a lot of myself in Jonathan’s story, even though the details are different.
When I was in my twenties, I had an accounting degree and a job at a major firm, and I was still drowning. Credit cards maxed out. Bad credit score. Living paycheck to paycheck, watching the calendar, waiting for the next deposit so I could breathe again.
I didn’t understand how I’d gotten there. I just knew I was stuck.
The thing is, I wasn’t stupid. I had studied accounting. I knew how money moved through a business. But nobody had ever taught me how to manage my own finances. That’s a completely different skill, and I had to learn it the hard way.
Jonathan is learning it the hard way too. So is his mom.
And I keep coming back to the same question: why do we let this happen?
Here’s what I’ve learned from digging into this stuff:
Most young people have never been taught how student loans actually work. There’s research showing that only about one in four fifteen-year-olds have learned about compound interest in school and actually retained it. One in four. And compound interest is the single most important concept for understanding how debt grows.
When adults are tested on basic financial literacy, the results aren’t much better. One study found that only about a third of Americans could figure out how long it would take for debt to double at a given interest rate.
This isn’t because people are dumb. It’s because the material isn’t taught.
Right now, only about 30% of high school students in America are guaranteed to take even one semester of personal finance before they graduate. The rest might get a few concepts mentioned in a math class, or they might get nothing at all.
So we have a system that hands eighteen-year-olds six-figure loan documents and assumes they understand what they’re signing. But we never taught them the information they’d need to actually understand it.
I’m not trying to say college isn’t worth it. For a lot of people, it is. Jonathan’s computer science degree has value. The question is whether he understood the tradeoff he was making, and whether anyone helped him think through whether $125,000 in debt was the right path to that degree.
Were there other options? Community college for the first two years? A different school with lower costs? More aggressive scholarship hunting? Maybe. Maybe not. The point is, I don’t think anyone sat down with him and actually ran the numbers.
I’ll be honest: that could have been me. I’m a CPA. I understand this stuff. But Jonathan and I were distant for a while back then. I was busy with my own career, my own family. By the time we reconnected, the papers were signed and the debt was already accumulating.
I’m not saying that to let myself off the hook. I think about it sometimes. But it also makes me think about how fragile the whole thing is. If the only way a teenager gets this information is by happening to have the right relative, available at the right time, willing to sit down and walk through the math? That’s not a system. That’s luck.
The federal loan system has this thing called “entrance counseling.” Before you can get your loans, you have to complete an online module that explains loan terms, repayment options, borrower responsibilities.
It takes maybe twenty or thirty minutes. It’s a checkbox. It’s not education.
Nobody walks an eighteen-year-old through their specific situation. Nobody helps them model out what their payments will look like relative to their expected salary. Nobody asks the hard questions about whether this particular school at this particular price makes sense for this particular student.
The system assumes informed borrowers. And then it lends to kids who’ve never been taught the information they’d need to be informed.
There’s a version of this story where I get angry. Where I point fingers at predatory lenders or broken institutions or politicians who’ve failed to act.
But honestly, that’s not where I land.
What I feel is sad. Sad for Jonathan, who’s thirty years old and still digging out from a decision he made at eighteen. Sad for his mom, who just wanted her kid to have a better life and ended up compromising her own future in the process. Sad for all the families going through some version of this right now, signing paperwork they don’t fully understand because the system doesn’t require that they understand it.
We ask teenagers to make the most consequential financial decision of their lives before they’ve ever paid rent or managed a credit card or learned what interest actually means. And then we act surprised when they struggle.
Jonathan did everything right. So did his mom. They still ended up underwater.
That’s not a personal failure. That’s a system that’s failing people.
My nephew is okay with me sharing his story. I asked before I wrote this. I think he gets that his experience isn’t unusual, that there are millions of people who made the same decision he did, with the same lack of information, and ended up in the same place.
He’s not a cautionary tale. He’s just a regular person who trusted a system that wasn’t designed to look out for him.
I think about him a lot. I think about his mom a lot.
And I keep coming back to the same question I always come back to: why doesn’t anyone teach this stuff?