Student loans: Can’t pay? Don’t pay!

In Canada, the average student debt sums up to $30,000

By KH

This article is an essay of personal experience in avoiding repayment of student loans from the period of 2010-2019. Read on to learn how you might avoid repayment, as one act in a broader struggle for universal free tuition!

Growing up in a single-parent home where we often couldn’t afford the basics, how I was going to pay for university was the last thing to cross my mind. Upon high school graduation, I got accepted to university, ready to start my academic career. I signed the student loan application without even a thought and was loaned $8,000 for my first year at 7% interest. I was 17 years old. Each year the debt kept piling up. At 21 I owed $33,000, and before I was even handed my degree I received a bill for my first loan payment: $600 per month. I hadn’t even graduated yet, and I certainly had no job prospects.

I researched for weeks prior to graduation, knowing I would receive a bill I couldn’t pay. I had heard all the horror stories: harassment by collection agencies, garnished wages, parents still paying off their loans into their 40’s and 50’s. I knew it was an injustice and that I would do whatever it took to avoid 20+ years of debt repayment for an education that is a human right. Nine years later I have not made a single payment, and the debt is legally dissolved. I now have a Master’s degree and am starting a PhD in the fall. Here’s how I avoided paying, and if you’re looking for a way out, you can too.

British students push back against Austerity

Special to Rebel Youth

Student activists in the UK were out on the streets yesterday, as part of a national day of action to protest against their government’s plans to privatise the student loan book.

The series of actions were the first step in what is expected to be a longer campaign.

"Student campaigners will be building opposition to the government’s intentions to sell off student debt to private companies before the next general election, which has caused widespread concern on campuses that this will lead to an increase in the financial burdens placed on students and graduates," the National Union of Students said in a press release.

Students of Canada: Rise Up!

This documents reflects discussions in the YCL about the way forward for the student movement today. We welcome opinions and comments. It was originally published in the print edition of Rebel Youth, number 13-14.

Other articles and series on this theme: political parties and student struggle; our coverage of the Quebec Student Strike; Students of Canada Rise Up; YCLer Marianne Breton Fontaine speaks on Student Solidarity tour; Call to 2013 YCL student conference; and student actions step ahead but not enough.

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We are living at a time when a sea change is beginning in people’s way of thinking, not necessarily towards revolution or even progressive politics, but searching for new alternatives to cut-backs, privatization and austerity.

Nowhere is this clearer than among the youth and students, and who is surprised?

At first glance, it might seem like there is an inter-generational war going on – in Québec, the rest of Canada, and around the world.

Youth are being denied even the hope of a future better than their parents, economically and ecologically.

But the austerity budgets just passed on the provincial level, and the Federal Harper Conservative government‘s omnibus Bill C-38, are really a sort of class warfare.

As has been said before, we are being forced to pay for an economic crisis we did not create.

In the gun-sights of the Harper Tories is the labour movement and especially public sector workers, as well as aboriginal people, women, immigrant and non-status workers, the environment, and now even our democratic rights.

An important part of this offensive is spinning the neo-liberal wrecking ball at the foundations of accessible, affordable, quality, public, not-for-profit education from cradle to grave.