How Student Debt Killed the Plot

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

62% : What to Know About Student Loan Debt ReliefCard 1 of 5 Many will benefit.
60% : The cherished American belief that a college degree provides a pathway to the middle class has made student loans among the most recession-proof forms of personal debt.
59% : The government, anxious that the country was falling behind in science, held out student loans as an incentive for Americans to specialize in engineering and math.
53% : They'll just keep on being people." "The Party Upstairs" is also a meta-narrative about the way student loans have derailed the forward motion of storytelling.
50% : What makes student loan borrowers in recent fiction unique, and uniquely literary, is that they often complain of having been betrayed by narrative itself.
49% : Student loans have also become a subplot in the world of erotica.
48% : In other novels, the desperate need to pay off student loans leads to desperate measures: In Jonathan Franzen's "Purity" (2015), a young woman with $130,000 in student loan debt travels to Bolivia to work for a Julian Assange hacker type in the hope that he can track down her father -- who could maybe help with her monthly payments.
46% : "The governing class believes in a story of mobility and financial prosperity that has not been true for 20 years," says the writer Molly McGhee, who is currently at work on her first novel, about a young man drowning in student loan debt.
45% : If you received a Pell Grant and meet these income requirements, you could qualify for an extra $10,000 in debt cancellation.
44% : In August, President Biden announced a student debt forgiveness program, to begin later this year, that could wipe out as much as $300 billion in student loan debt.
44% : This precarious reality and its accompanying emotional fallout -- a unique concoction of dread, bewilderment and uncertainty -- have lately begun to pervade contemporary fiction, yielding a spate of novels featuring protagonists mired in student loan debt.
42% : Vincent had considered college, but "knowing that a college degree might change your life" and possessing "a willingness to actually commit to the terrifying weight of student loans" were two different things.
39% : Individuals who are single and earn $125,000 or less will qualify for the $10,000 in debt cancellation.
36% : That these writers are able to find ways out of debt for their protagonists only through unlikely or implausible plot twists is a testament to how impossible student loan repayment can feel in reality.

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