I worked and paid off my student loan- My thoughts on President Biden's action

Like many others who attended college in the '70s and '80s (and today), my education was made possible by a student loan.

For the next several years, I made payments on that loan until one day I received a letter telling me my loan was "paid in full."

Unfortunately, two weeks later, I received a letter telling me that I still owed 13 cents- 13 cents!

Rather than pay the 13 cents and get the creditor off my back forever, I wrote a letter declaring I would not be paying the 13 cents because "paid in full means paid in full."

More than 30 years have passed, and I still have not received a response to that letter. Either I made my point or someday I will receive notice that my original student loan has accumulated an incredible amount of interest.

I accepted the loan and paid back every cent of it because that was my responsibility.

Now I read that President Biden has issued an executive order that has greatly reduced student loan debt for some and completely eliminated it for others.

Thousands will get their "paid in full" without actually paying it in full. They won't have to painstakingly scrape together payments month after month and worry if they are going to be able to make their next installments.

Perhaps I should be resentful that a mollycoddled generation is having its debt wiped away through executive fiat. That is the message being sent to me by those who are using the president's action to stoke division.

Perhaps I should be resentful, but I am not.

I was overjoyed when I read what the president has done. I wish he would have done more.

Many of the teachers I worked with were weighted down by student loan debt they accumulated so they could work at a job at which they were woefully underpaid.

My student loan debt was considerably less. I only needed to borrow $5,000 because I was fortunate enough to seek higher education at a time when it was more affordable.

My payments were not hundreds of dollars. I paid $33 a month. It seemed like a lot when I was making $250 a week (before taxes) as editor of the Lamar Democrat, but I did not face the burden faced by those who sought higher education over the next few decades.

My education came at a time before the cost of credit hours soared since college and university officials quickly realized the sky was the limit when students had access to loans. The money was rolling in and who cared if the young people who hoped to lay the groundwork for their futures would be saddled in debt for a great deal of those futures?

Some opponents of President Biden's executive order complained that those who did not go to college would be forced to pay for those whose debts had been forgiven.

Those who did not go to college have every right to complain, but not about the student loan decision. Their complaints should be directed at the politicians and business executives whose decisions have eliminated well-paying jobs that did not require a college education by moving them overseas, busting unions and sacrificing jobs and plants on the altar of dividends for stockholders and ever-increasing salaries and benefits for executives.

As these decisions decimated the middle class, we began to hear the mantra that young people will not be able to succeed without a college education. More and more students were pushed into making decisions that they might not have made in the past because well-paying blue-collar jobs were no longer a priority.

Many of the people who began accumulating student debt would never have even considered attending college in years past. Now they were told it was a necessity.

As we are well into the 21st Century, the jobs for which our institutions of higher education allegedly prepared our students are no longer as plentiful and nowhere near as lucrative.

Meanwhile, our colleges and universities have increased tuition rates year after year and our younger generations have mortgaged their futures by incurring financial responsibilities built on a bridge of broken promises.

When I signed the papers for my student loan more than 40 years ago, I accepted a responsibility- I would work to get an education and once I received that education, I would repay my debt. That's exactly what I did, and it was worth every penny.

I received a fair deal.

The same cannot be said for those who have fallen victim to the shell game that today's version of higher education has become.

I celebrate President Biden's executive action and hope it is just a first decision in many that will make higher education an affordable dream and not a recurring nightmare.