"Borrowed Future: How Student Loans Are Killing The American Dream"
My Thoughts On the Documentary Film
He’s selling body parts to make his student loan payments!
That was what I said to myself as I watched Josiah Poletta, a teacher from Ohio featured in the documentary Borrowed Future: How Student Loans Are Killing The American Dream, talk about selling his blood plasma twice a week to make ends meet because of his $100,000+ student loan debt.
“You’ve got to take debt off the table,” Anthony O’Neill advises in the documentary. That is exactly what my family did. Allowing my son to take on student loan debt was simply not an option. Before my son started winning scholarships, to ensure that he could go to college without student loans, I took on several side hustles: I shopped for and delivered groceries, and I worked for a company driving people to/from our small town to the nearest major airport one hour away. Between my day job and these extra gigs, I was running myself ragged (not to mention the wear and tear on my car!). What would have taken me 3166 hours to accomplish with side gigs, my son accomplished in less than one-tenth of the time with scholarships!
The documentary cites a statistic from the U.S. Department of Education: “Every year, $3 billion goes unclaimed by incoming freshmen.” This number even shocked me. I had read statistics that said $100 million in scholarships go unclaimed every year. But $3 billion?! Regardless of which number is correct, the point is that there are tons of scholarships out there.
“It’s a numbers game,” says $500,000+ scholarship winner Kristina Ellis in the film. She’s right. My son won only 20% of the scholarships he applied for. You can’t just apply for one or two scholarships and think your job is done. In the section of the film dealing with scholarships, financial guru Dave Ramsey says, “Where you do not have set goals, and you do not go through a series of behaviors with intentionality, you are never going to be, in that area of your life, successful.” He’s specifically speaking of finding and winning scholarships. This is why I advise my high school senior client-students to spend either 30 minutes per day or 3 hours per week on scholarships.
“We’ve got to teach young people how to really take ownership of their life. If they’re paying something out of their pocket, they will take their education experience a little bit more seriously…” says Anthony O’Neill. He’s right. Students who work to pay for college, or put in the time and effort needed to win scholarships not only enjoy the financial benefits of graduating debt-free, but they actually do better in college.
At a 5% interest rate (good luck finding a student loan with that low of an interest rate), one year’s worth of interest on just a $5000 student loan comes to $250.00. For LESS THAN $250, you get lifetime access for your entire family to the Scholarship GPS course, where I share what I learned to help my son earn 23 private outside scholarships and to graduate college debt-free.
A big ‘Thank you!’ to Audria for suggesting this documentary to me. You can hear my interview with Audria and her son, Talon, who won over $110,000 in scholarships here.
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