I’m glad you see my point. I consider myself a relatively smart person, but at 18, I was way too naive to make a decision of this nature when so much debt was involved. I did end up declaring bankruptcy during a rough time awhile back, and the only academic debt that went away was the semester of tuition that I put on a credit card. I’ve been paying my loans for years, I got one forgiven entirely from my years as a teacher, and I got one lowered by $5,000 from an AmeriCorps grant, but the balances are still almost what they were when I began. Years ago.

Learning wasn’t a mistake. Paying this much to learn, though, when I wasn’t 100% sure why I was learning… that was the mistake.