Peace and Justice League anti-student-debt rally attracts crowd of concerned students

UNH biology student Sarah Young and Rep. Jackie Cilley (D-Barrington), address the crowd at yesterday’s lunchtime rally. Rep. Cilley’s remarks can be heard in part here.

(Durham-NHPoliticalWire) The stories were sobering and strikingly similar. One after another, young people stood with a bullhorn in their hands and shared their stories about how the high cost of higher education – and the student loan debt it engenders – limited their horizons and cast a shadow on their futures at a time that should be reserved for optimism and idealism. The dozens of people gathered at the lunchtime rally in a UNH courtyard nodded in recognition and sympathy.

Remarks from Sarah Young (pictured above) captured the feeling of many.

“I have $60,000 in student debt that my parents co-signed. If I can’t pay, they could lose our house. If I can’t join the Peace Corps and get deferrals, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

Recent UNH grad Georgia Elgard pointed out the impact that student debt loads has on the futures that she and her peers can look forward to.

“We are forced to make decisions from different levels of freedom,” Elgard said. “Lots of us would like to become teachers or social workers or, like me, change the food system, but we always have to consider the debt we’re carrying.”

Rep. Wayne Burton (D-Durham), a career higher-education administrator, shared his recollection of seeing thousands pack the courtyard in protest to the war in Viet Nam. He reminded the students that those protests “worked.”

“Our democracy is only as strong as the intelligence of its people. If we in any way prevent a student from attending college because of massive student debt, we are doing it a disservice,” Rep. Burton told The New Hampshire, UNH’s student newspaper.

Rep. Jackie Cilley (D-Barrington), an adjunct professor at the Peter T. Paul School of Business, tied growing student loan debt and increasing college costs to another current crisis: the growing gap in wealth inequality.

“I was the first in my entire extended family to be able to go to college. There were Pell Grants, reasonable student loans, assistantships, and housing assistance… because society said to people like me that ‘we believe in you, we want to invest in you, we want you to be part of the future.’ Somewhere along the line, we have forgotten that.”

“The seminal issue of your generation is wage inequality and the growing gap between the very richest and everybody else. The reason that that is so important is that parents used to be able to pay the tuition for their children. But because of depressed wages for now four decades, they are unable to contribute in the ways they might want to because they have their own financial problems,” Cilley added.