Man Flees the United States to Escape $30,000 in Student Loan Debt
“I was expected to make a $400 loan payment every month”
This young man is probably going to regret this decision. Especially since it’s not a huge amount of debt. It seems like he acted rashly.
USA Today reports:
A college grad flees U.S. to avoid student loan debt: ‘I had to escape this prison’
Eventually, Chad Albright just couldn’t take it anymore. The rejection, the depression, the mounting bills, it became too much to deal with all on his own.
“I had to escape this debtors’ prison,” he said. It felt like there was no other choice. “That’s what America became to me, a prison. So I left.”
Albright bought a one-way ticket to China and boarded an airplane, uncertain if he would ever return to the country he once considered home.
It was 2011, and Albright was 30 years old, starting over in a country more than 7,000 miles away from his life in Pennsylvania — away from his family, his friends, and far away from the $30,000 he owed in student loans.
Borrowing money for college seemed like a sound financial decision at the time. Albright thought his degree would reliably lead the way to a well-paying career.
With tuition comes high debt. And when delivering pizzas was the only job he could find two years post-graduation — with the country’s outstanding student debt rising above $1 trillion, and one million people defaulting on student loans every year — it didn’t seem like it was worth it after all.
“I was expected to make a $400 loan payment every month, but I had no money, no sustainable income,” Albright said during a Skype interview. “College ruined my life.”
In high school, he read books about the American dream, classics like “The Great Gatsby” and “The Grapes of Wrath.” If he worked hard, it would pay off — that’s what he was always told.
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The unemployment rate is at 3.6% and companies are desperate for even marginally acceptable employees. And yet the only job this man with a college degree could find was delivering pizza? Sounds more like someone with near zero job skills and a worthless degree.
I hear you but I’ve also read most of the job gains have gone to migrants. I don’t know if it’s true. Either way, exiling yourself over $30k in debt seems a bit extreme.
Well, the guy left in 2011… under Obama.
However, I would have thought that what he actually majored in would have been an important part of the story. I did not see it anywhere… must need to get my eyes checked.
Elsewhere, his major is reported as public relations.
Boy needs a trip to the woodshed before being turned out to do some manual labor.
If $400 a month was enough to harsh his little mellow then his degree must have been in something really critical.
There is not a damned thing wrong with delivering pizzas or any other service job. If the work does not pay enough then upgrade your skill set to another endeavor that does pay more.
While I am sure he can find under the table jobs in China, if he gets caught he might find ChiCom authorities slightly more authoritarian than the US on working without a valid work permit.
The article I linked below said he is now in the Ukraine, working in sales and he has taught English in both countries.
He also wasn’t a little punk spoiled millenial. He was a guy that tried to work and save up money to go and it just didn’t all pan out…sad, really. (Public relations major from a middling school…Millersville University)
A good bit of these folks…born 1990 and after are facing a paradox of the worst kind.
We now have more readily available information than we’ve EVER had and it is exponentially increasing. There are so many resources (almost too many) to draw on that younger gens for some reason don’t care to do so (don’t consider it worth their time and/or don’t want to figure out how to sift through it).
The skills of discernment and self-help are atrophying rapidly for a group that have never been catalyzed to use these skills throughout their young lives. Further, they don’t know how to communicate and how to ask someone other than the internet for advice.
If this young man was not trapped in this web, then he might have been able to look into a nice little income-based repayment plan, which is freely available to everyone directly from the government.
I had more than double his loans and Sallie Mae/Navient wanted me to pay 800 per month as a post-doc (a low paying post Ph D job akin to residency for MDs). I would have laughed at them if not for the sticker shock….I got switched to a longer term plan and cut it in half (with the option to pay more on principal as I could).
Of course, my whole soapbox missed the point that he is now 37/38 (my age).
Yeesh…I guess we had our helpless peons too!
Ok…this article could have used from a lot more research.
(and admittedly I went off before doing it myself)
Read this one, much better (and sadder, honestly):
It seems his only real mistake was choosing the wrong major (public relations) and he might not have the right personality or even look for a highly competitive job like that. (well the other mistake is fleeing the country)
https://www.ydr.com/story/news/education/2019/06/11/student-loan-debt-pa-college-graduate-flees-country-escape/1329116001/
We’ll know that this sort of thing is getting the attention it deserves, when we see kids who fail out of STEM degrees going straight to trade school to limit the financial damage, rather than transferring to one of those other majors at the college that’s designed to “retain” such students.
If ya can’t pay off the load … then don’t sign the note.
In high school, he read books about the American dream, classics like “The Great Gatsby” and “The Grapes of Wrath.” If he worked hard, it would pay off
Just as a guess, he didn’t actually read either—not even the blurbs on the back covers. As I recall, one is about people who don’t work particularly hard, and the other is about it not paying off.
OK, who was it that forcibly placed this dude in college?
Who also was the thug that beat him until he chose his Golden Dream Producing Major?
Golly gee willikers….you mean he’s expected to actually pay back a loan he willingly agreed to pay back?
Debtors prison indeed.
Seems the book he most likely read was “Art Of The Squeal.”
This budding Einstein lacked the self-awareness to realize that Public Relations was unlikely to be a beneficial degree for someone whose face resembles an old first-baseman’s mitt.
So now he’s been clearing $1000 a month, with no rent payment, for a decade and hasn’t paid his loan down. He wants to go out on the town instead.
You can bet this irresponsible douchebag will be voting absentee for whatever Sociist candidate promises college loan “forgiveness” which of course means we all get to pay for his poor decisions and lazyness.
He’s a fugitive from the United States, but we only get a certain number of years of life and we can spend them anywhere we want that will take us. He should pay his debts, sure, but he can’t, and I’m just glad he’s found a way to enjoy his life.