Short,
intense directed apprenticeships that teach students how to learn on
their own to mastery are the future of higher education. http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/06/time-ditch-4-years-costly-college-directed-apprenticeships.html#more-57897 So
it turns out sitting in a chair for four years doesn’t deliver mastery
in anything but the acquisition of staggering student-loan debt. Practical (i.e. useful) mastery requires not just hours of practice but directed deep learning via doing of the sort you only get in an apprenticeship. The failure of our model of largely passive learning and rote practice is explained by Daniel Coyle in his book The Talent Code (sent to me by Ron G.), which upends the notion that talent is a genetic gift. It isn’t–in his words, it’s grown by deep practice, the ignition of motivation and master coaching. Using
these techniques, student reach levels of accomplishment in months that
surpass those of students who spent years in hyper-costly conventional
education programs. The potential to radically improve our higher
education system while reducing the cost of that education by 90% is the
topic of my books Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy and The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy: The Revolution in Higher Education. Let’s
start by admitting our system of higher education is unsustainable and
broken: a complete failure by any reasonable, objective standard.
Tuition has soared $1,100% while the output of the system (the
economic/educational value of a college degree) has declined
precipitously.
A recent major study, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, concluded that “American higher education is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students.” ‘Academically Adrift’: The News Gets Worse and Worse (The Chronicle of Higher Education) These
two charts are the acme of unsustainability: college tuition has
skyrocketed, along with federally funded student loan debt. The
typical graduate of a short, intense directed apprenticeship says “I
learned more in a month here than I did in four years of college.” This is a statement of fact, and it is the result of the methods deployed in structured on-the-job training. It
is a fact that passively listening to a lecture does not generate the
sort of mastery that creates economic value or the sort of deep
understanding that is the goal of a classic liberal arts education. It’s
also a fact that rote practice also doesn’t lead to mastery, and often
kills the very passion for a subject that in more productive programs
jumpstarts mastery. Our higher educational system has failed so badly that many students are incapable of writing/communicating effectively.
In a world of rapidly changing technologies across every field and an
emerging economy that places an ever-higher premium on collaboration and
clear communication across multiple time zones and languages, the
ability to write clearly is absolutely essential. To
“graduate” students with poor writing skills is completely
unforgivable. Yet in the current system, if a student logs the requisite
number of credits, a diploma is duly issued, regardless of how little
he/she actually learned. Here’s a six-month program that could replace four years of hyper-costly, ineffective university. 1.
Teach the students how to learn on their own, for the rest of their
lives. This could take as little as a few hours or days. Once a student
learns how to pursue deep learning and deep practice on their own, they
don’t need years of classrooms–they just need the guidance of someone
experienced in the field, i.e. a structured apprenticeship. 2.
One semester in a wide variety of on-the-job experiences. Once students
are given real experience in a variety of fields and industries, it’s
likely some spark of ignition will occur and they’ll find the motivation
to pursue real mastery instead of a worthless credential. 3.
Directed apprenticeships plus online lectures/workshops by the best
lecturers viewed before or after the students’ real work. The key to
learning deeply and learning fast is to push right up against the
current level of competence, where failure occurs and can be addressed
one piece at a time. Interestingly,
Coyle notes that the most successful incubators of talent around the
world are generally in makeshift or decrepit buildings, not fancy new
gleaming buildings of the sort that dot American college campuses.
Surrounded by luxury, who feels any hunger to learn anything
voraciously? The entire
“campus experience” should be jettisoned, not just as an overly
expensive infrastructure but as a detriment to fast, deep learning that
is the foundation of mastery. It
isn’t that hard to teach students how to improve their
writing/communications skills very quickly, and give them a taste of the
classic liberal arts education so many people claim is the goal of
$120,000 four-year programs that fail to generate a deep understanding
of anything remotely leading to mastery. Give
them a single sentence by Melville, Austin, et al. and have them
compose a sentence that is like the original in cadence, structure and
meaning in one minute flat. Go, go, go. Then break down each phrase and
each component and work through each one to improve their first efforts,
step by step. Repeat the process, always under intense time pressure. Then
take them out into the real world to report a journalistic story by
interviewing people, checking facts, confirming quotes from sources,
question the received wisdom around the topic and compose the story in
journalistic style. Once again, break down their efforts line by line in
comparison with a professional journalists’ story on the same topic. Then,
in the second class… more doing the work at a breakneck pace, more
being pushed beyond their current level of expertise, more corrections
of errors and weaknesses, step by step, in a pressure-cooker of
deadlines. I can pretty much
guarantee the students in such a directed apprenticeship will learn more
about writing in a week than they would in a year of conventional
coursework. Short, intense
directed apprenticeships that teach students how to learn on their own
to mastery are the future of higher education. We can continue to
squander trillions of dollars on an ineffective system until it finally
collapses under its own weight, or we can admit the current contraption
is unsustainable and a failure, and move on to a better, cheaper system.
A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All is now available as an Audible audio book.
Student loan debt continues to be one of the largest economic
issues plaguing the U.S., with the total amount topping $1.3 trillion.
Hillary Clinton’s higher education policy touts debt-free degrees for
underprivileged students. But is she being genuine in her efforts to
address the issue?
While Hillary loves to rail against shady for-profit
colleges on the campaign trail, she does have some financial ties to
them that are likely to shape whether or not she holds them accountable
for ripping students off.
It was recently revealed through Hillary’s emails that during her first year as Secretary of State she insisted that Laureate Education be included in the guest list for an education policy dinner hosted at the U.S. Department of State.
“It’s a for-profit model that should be represented,” she
wrote in the August 2009 email, and as a result, a senior vice president
at Laureate was added to the guest list. Several months later, former President Bill Clinton became an honorary chancellor of
Laureate International Universities, which turned out to be incredibly
lucrative. He was paid a cool $16.5 million between 2010 and 2014 for
his role with the for-profit college.
Also consider that while 12 percent of the country’s students go to for-profits, a whopping 96 percent of them have to take out federal loans. As
a result, for-profit colleges account for 25 percent of all federal
financial aid dollars and half of all Department of Defense Tuition
Assistance funds.
After all, without the sucker U.S. taxpayer, how would rent-seeking politicians get paid?
Some may argue that not all for-profit colleges are created
equal, and it’s unfair to group Laureate together with the now defunct
Corinthian Colleges, which was forced to cease all U.S. operations due
to various state and federal investigations. But Laureate seems to be
plagued with similar issues. That’s why the company decided to expand in Latin American countries rather than the U.S. with the help of Bill Clinton.
There are five schools in the U.S. that operate under Laureate’s
umbrella. Walden University is a Laureate school in Minneapolis, and even though its parent company had the money to pay our former president $4 million a year, Walden charges students nearly $60,000 in tuition and fees for most undergraduate degrees.
Laureate gets 84 percent of
its revenue from outside the U.S., and mostly from Latin American
countries. The company faced a great deal backlash in Chile and Brazil,
leading to the loss of accreditation for one of its Chilean schools in
2014.
Hillary’s biggest challenge against Bernie Sanders is how much
money in politics has influenced her policy decisions. While both
candidates address combating student loan debt and college affordability
in very different ways, it’s critical to follow the money and figure
out who is being sincere about solving the problem.
The truth is that Hillary’s higher ed policy isn’t very different
from what we have in place now, which I will delve into in my upcoming
column. Now her ties to the for-profit college industry make me
question whether she’ll hold them accountable if she got elected.
Clinton herself was paid $225,000 for speaking at
a 2014 event sponsored by Academic Partnerships, a for-profit education
company that helps public and private not-for-profit universities move
degree programs online. Jeb Bush was also one of its investors.
Let me guess, she did it because of 9/11, or because “it’s what they
offered.” The only federal building this woman is fit to occupy is a
penitentiary.
The
decision could be a relief to student borrowers unable to escape the
weight of hefty loans since student debt is much harder to get rid of
than other forms of debt in bankruptcy court. Under current law,
established by the court in the 1970s, borrowers can shed education debt
only if they can prove paying it off would be an "undue hardship," a
distinction that has remained vague, and that has caused clashes between
lower courts using different interpretations, according to Bloomberg.
Consideration
of the issue by the Supreme Court would mark a rare but timely
occurrence given the more than $1.2 trillion collective student debt
rain cloud hanging over millions of Americans' heads. Bloomberg reports
that outstanding educational debts, which are the largest source of
consumer debt next to mortgages, is expected to double within the next
decade to $2.5 trillion.
Brunner test, and the limits of "undue hardship"
Flickr/Mark Fischer - flic.kr
Courts
differ in their interpretation of the law, using two gauges to
determine if student debt can be erased in bankruptcy. One, called the
Brunner test, requires proof that the debtor has tried to pay the loans
off, and that continued payments would disallow "minimal" living
standards, and lead to a significantly worse quality of life in the
future.
In
the first case, the Brunner test is being challenged by a 57-year-old
Wisconsin man named Mark Tetzlaff, who has struggled paying back
$260,000 in student loan debt. After he was denied loan forgiveness,
Tetzlaff is arguing that having to prove his life would be made
significantly worse is a bastardization of "undue hardship," and that
the standards used in his case are unconstitutional. Tetzlaff filed an
appeal to the high court last week, Bloomberg reports.
How courts could reconsider student debt forgiveness
Flickr/COD Newsroom - flic.kr
In
another similar case that could find its way to the Supreme Court, a
62-year-old man struggling to pay off more than $200,000 in education
debt is awaiting which test the courts decide to use. According to MarketWatch,
the first circuit courts don't have a precedent for using the Brunner
test or the alternative, known as the totality of circumstances, which
is generally considered to be less stringent. If the courts use the
latter test, the split could catch the high court's attention and prompt
them to reconsider student debt forgiveness.
The details of both cases are thick and a bit wonky, but their potential for change is great.
As
MarketWatch notes, if students can more readily shuck nagging loans,
the U.S. Department of Education stands to lose the money it was
expecting to collect—a fear already on their radar. Few borrowers with
education debts opt for the bankruptcy route thanks to a convoluted
legal process, but it is yet unclear how a possible Supreme Court case
could change that. Considering that one-fourth of student loan borrowers is either in default or struggling to pay loans, there is no real indication that this number will shrink.
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/16/2015 13:40 -0400 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-10-16/problem-isnt-student-loans-its-higher-education Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of ofTwoMinds blog, Forgiving skyrocketing student debt won't solve the real problem,
which is the soaring costs imposed by a cartel that is failing to
prepare students for the economy of tomorrow. Everyone understands soaring student debt is a problem:
burdened with $1.3 trillion in student loans, young people are unable to
start businesses, buy homes and start families. The high cost of
housing and meeting regulations to launch businesses add additional
burdens, but the weight of $1.3 trillion in debt right out of the
starting gate is crushing. The "solution" being pursued by the federal government is obvious:
take over most of the student debt and then eventually bury it in the
zombie-loan graveyard (i.e. defaults are ignored but the debt isn't
officially written off), write it down via forgiveness programs, or some
other mechanism to reduce the burden.
If this wasn't the plan, then why has federal ownership of student
loan debt skyrocketed from zero to $900 million in a few short years? This is a decades-old problem that's finally reaching critical mass: student debt has leaped from less than $500 billion in 2006 to $1.3 trillion today, a mere 9 years later: The problem isn't student loans--it's the explosive rise in the costs of higher education. This chart depicts the exponential rise of higher education costs:
Apologists claim the student-loan crisis is the result of
underfunding of colleges by states. While it's true that some of the
cost burden has been shifted from taxpayers to students, the real
problem is soaring costs of the higher education cartel, which fixes
prices via the artifical scarcity of accreditation. The extraordinary rise in administrative staffing and costs and
the boom in building costly temples of higher education are well-known. This chart depicts the rise of the educrat class, at the expense of teachers/professors: I cover the rise in costs and the the equally extraordinary
failure of the higher education cartel to prepare students for work in
the emerging economy in my book The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy: The Revolution in Higher Education.
So the problem is two-fold: it isn't just the insane cost of higher
education that's the issue; the cartel is failing to prepare students
for an economy that requires the 8 essential skills in addition to whatever technical skills are needed in a particular field.
Consider the study Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses which concluded that "American higher education is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students." New Analysis Shows Problematic Boom In Higher Ed Administrators: In all, from 1987 until 2011-12--the most recent academic year for
which comparable figures are available—universities and colleges
collectively added 517,636 administrators and professional employees,
according to the analysis by the New England Center for Investigative
Reporting. “There’s just a mind-boggling amount of money per student that’s
being spent on administration,” said Andrew Gillen, a senior researcher
at the institutes. “It raises a question of priorities.” The ratio of nonacademic employees to faculty has also doubled.
There are now two nonacademic employees at public and two and a half at
private universities and colleges for every one full-time, tenure-track
member of the faculty. The number of employees in central system offices has increased
six-fold since 1987, and the number of administrators in them by a
factor of more than 34. Paying a bloated institution for the privilege of sitting through
four years of lectures, online courses and a few labs no longer makes
sense for the vast majority of students. What makes sense is dispensing with the entire bureaucracy of the cartel and costly campuses altogether, and designing directed apprenticeships which combine the best of online coursework with on-the-job training in workplaces.
The top research universities (numbering around 125 out of thousands
of colleges and universities) can continue to train the relatively small
cadre of academics and researchers the economy can support. (Just
issuing STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) degrees doesn't
magically create jobs for the graduates.) The vast majority of student are better served by mastering the 8 essential skills required in the emerging economy--skills that students can acquire on their own, a process of accrediting yourself that I address in detail in Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy. Forgiving skyrocketing student debt won't solve the real problem which is the soaring costs imposed by a cartel that is failing to prepare students for the economy of tomorrow.
Nervously sitting in the WorkSource office in downtown Seattle,
a slip of paper with my number rapidly yellowing with sweat clenched
between my fingers, a man in filthy jeans and mismatched shoes turned to
me and asked what I was doing there.
“You don’t look poor enough to be here,” he told me.
He was right. I didn’t. Because what we collectively think of as “looking poor” does not, in fact, encompass the real face of poverty
in this country. As a white, 22-year-old college graduate in a
second-hand dress, I did not look like what we think of as “poor.”
Of course, at that exact moment, I had, yes, a college degree and a coveted unpaid (because, of course, it was unpaid) internship at a public radio station. But I also had a minimum wage
job to support myself, $17 in my bank account, $65,000 in debt to my
name, and $800 in rent due in 24 days. I was extremely hungry, worried
about my utilities being shut off, and 100 percent planning to hit up
the dumpster at the nearby Starbucks
when I was done there. I had no functional stove in my tiny apartment
because the gas it took to make it work was, at $10 per month, too
expensive. I was at WorkSource to find out if I qualified for literally
any program to make my finances less crushing.
I had, like millions of other working Americans and many, many millennials, no financial safety net.
In the United States, approximately 15 percent of residents live below the poverty line and another 10.4 million are considered “the working poor.” And yet, we have very, very concrete—and very incorrect—perceptions about how poverty actually looks. And it does not look like millennial college grads. So we kind of keep ignoring it.
The
disconnect is simple: Poverty doesn’t look the way we think it looks,
so we don’t think people who are, in fact, poor “look poor,” so we
assume that poverty isn’t really that bad. We also assume that by taking
steps that have traditionally been associated with improved economy
status, it will get better.
We are now seeing that it might not.
Through college debt, we are minting a new generation of people with less opportunity, rather than more
Even if you glossed right over the teachings of Thomas Piketty,
you probably know that those who start out poor are more likely to stay
poor. When you are constantly fighting your way up from zero (or
negative), you tend to stay that way. And when education
is supposed to be the path out, if it leads to more debt, it’s more
cyclical than linear. New grads no longer start from zero—they start
with a negative balance.
Consider what we’re setting up for our
future by thinking about poverty in terms of how it should be, and not
how it is. We are pushing education on everyone, then punishing
education and the pursuit of a higher income with so much debt that
there is no way to win.
There is an assumption about college students that, when they graduate,
they will be permitted a small amount of time to get back on their feet
by moving home with their parents. With no small amount of contempt, we
refer to these people as “boomerang kids.”
However, just as is the case with almost everything, ever, the
ability to move back home—to take an unpaid internship without batting
an eye—is, in and of itself, a huge privilege. And it is a privilege
that begets other privileges.
In 2012, nearly half of American households were just one emergency away from poverty or homelessness. Most Americans don’t have the savings for literally one—one—unexpected bill. There are more individuals considered “the working poor” than there are who are not considered as such. Over 1.5 million individuals were
estimated to have been homeless at some point in 2014. In a country
where people never agree on a damn thing, nearly three-quarters of
people can agree on the sentiment that the poor are getting poorer.
They aren’t just getting poorer, though. We are making them poorer.
In the U.S., about a third of college students are
first-generation attendees, meaning their parents did not go to
college. That percentage is much higher among people of color. Many of
them—and even many students whose parents did go to college, but it’s
worse for first-gen students—don’t have the ability to move home after
college, either because:
A) Their parents don’t have the means to support them
B) Their parents live in impoverished areas where, if they were to move home, they would be unable to find work.
OR
C) Some combination of the two.
Or, possibly, D) Maybe they are one of the 20,000 kids who age out of foster care each year and there is just nowhere else for them to go.
But
for many of those first-gen college students (and students whose
parents, too, are considered the “working poor” but might even have some
college), graduation puts them worse off than they were before. The
idea that there is a safety net—that boomeranging is the norm—is just
not true, and it is detrimental.
Saddled with student loans they statistically will not be able to pay off for at least a decade (the average debt is about $30,000; the average income for a recent new grad is only about $44,000, and the unemployment rate hovers around 8.5 percent),
which are due every month on top of rent and other expenses, many
college graduates are worse off than they would have been if they’d
directly entered the workforce debt-free. More college students live in
poverty—actual poverty, not just
“can’t-afford-pizza-better-call-the-parents” brokeness—than the overall population. One in five millennials is considered “in poverty” today, up from one in eight in 1980.
The cycle is predatory. From the Boston Globe, reporting on a study released by Crittenton Women’s Union:
The
study, based on a survey of more than 100 low-income individuals, found
that most of the debts resulted from stretches of unemployment, medical
costs, and student loans. The study also found that poor people are
often overwhelmed by high interest rates that make it nearly impossible
to pay down debts, then penalized again when prospective employers or
landlords conduct credit checks before hiring or renting to them.
And the prospects are not improving. Because as income increases for college grads (58 percent of millennials will
receive a bachelor’s degree), so does the cost of living. So do
interest rates. So does the rent. So do home prices. So does the cost of
doing literally everything.
“Good” jobs—those jobs you need a degree for—still don’t pay the bills. More new college grads use food stamps than ever before; in fact, the demand has doubled. And while millennials are arguably facing the brunt of it, it doesn’t end there; even seniors are being hit by lingering student debt.
So what do we do? Make college more affordable? Free, even? Nope, say some. That won’t work, either.
Earlier this year, President Obama floated the idea of offering two free years of community college to anyone; critics immediately raised their fingers to
point out that if that happens, some people of means might take
advantage of that offering. Or that maybe a college education isn’t even worth that much, anyway, so why go into deeper national debt to provide one to everyone?
When education is
supposed to be the path out, if it leads to more debt, it’s more
cyclical than linear. New grads no longer start from zero—they start
with a negative balance.
Almost no solution for this problem seems to please anyone—and almost all of them that do have some kind of bipartisan support rely on already having access to money and resources or settling for an education that could put you at a disadvantage (something I’ve written about before).
And
yet, when most people think about poverty, they think something else.
Maybe they think about a homeless man begging for change. Maybe they
think of the “welfare queen,” who bilks the government for money (when,
of course, it is actually the wealthiest who
take the most). Maybe they think about a family that looked a lot like
mine did growing up (one provider, too many kids, receiving WIC and food
stamps and every other kind of assistance we could and even then still
living precariously close to poverty).
Most likely, they imagine
brown faces. Because don’t forget, part of what a lot of people mean
what they talk about what poverty looks like is a statement on and race
in America. When the man at WorkSource told me I didn’t “look poor
enough,” my whiteness was probably a big part of that sentiment.
And
that is also inaccurate. Which is not to say that people of color (and
especially millennials of color) don’t experience disproportionate
unemployment—they do—but it is to say that poverty is an everybody issue.
“As it turns out, our deeply racialized view of poverty bears no resemblance to reality,” wrote Leonard Pitts, Jr. for the Miami Heraldlast
year. “Though it’s true that African Americans are disproportionately
likely to live below the poverty line, it is also true that the vast
majority of those in poverty are white: 29.8 million people. In fact,
there are more white poor than all other poor combined.”
Still,
the ongoing challenges that face millennials of color are real. They
face more and different struggles than white millennials when it comes
to even getting into college. Higher high school dropout rates, disproportionate rates of incarceration, and other factors all contribute to the difficulty of even making it to college. The paths to college for white and non-white millennials are very different. But to what end?
Often, college graduation rates among people of color are hailed as proof that thing are getting better (which, in some cases, is actually pretty hopeful), because, while millennials are seeing some closure in the race gap, graduation rates are still pretty unequal.
The
prospects are not improving. Because as income increases for college
grads (58 percent of millennials will receive a bachelor’s degree), so
does the cost of living.
Except that graduation is still
not a guarantee of wealth, success, or even improved economy status. We
should forget about the gender pay gap, which starts basically right after women—yes, even women in STEM—get their diplomas.
Whatever poverty looks like to the general population, it is clearly not very sympathetic; most people don’t think that the government should provide more assistance than they currently are. In a 2012 poll, the majority of Americans surveyed said they thought welfare is being abused by those who rely on it. And our lawmakers continue to make it harder to bail ourselves out, blocking bills that would help make education less bank-breaking.
But we also, collectively, tend to agree that
poor people do not face an even playing field and that the roots of
poverty are systemic, not a result of laziness or failings by those who
are poor. We support raising the minimum wage because the plain fact is that life is more expensive now than it was 10, 30, or 50 years ago, and the idea that everyone should be able to rise above the minimum is just not realistic.
I
have been poor more than I have been not-poor. I grew up poor. I went
to a university (something that neither of my parents did, through
choice, circumstance, and a systemic series of beliefs about who college
is for) to no longer be poor, because I believed, as I was told by
guidance counselors and the media and many adults and colleges
themselves, that that was the only way to be not-poor.
And yet,
going to college made me, at least in the years since I’ve graduated,
more poor. I was more financially strained than I ever could have
imagined, more crushed by the persistent weight of debt, and more driven
by income than almost anything else. This is not about a lack of fiscal
responsibility; this is the fallout of a culture that says there is
only one way to get ahead, and that way is a treacherous one.
When
we talk about millennials, we can’t not talk about the debt that keeps
us reigned in, and the difficulty in getting out of it.
We
don’t look poor. I don’t look poor. And most often, I find it too
uncomfortable to talk about how really easy it is to be poor, even when
you’re working and you went to college and you are doing everything
right.
So I have to wonder: What if we stopped trying to decide who was poor
based on appearance and actually looked at the financials of those who
were scraping by? What if we calculated poverty not based on those who
were literally already homeless (though to be honest we do a shit job of
that, too), but rather based on everyone who is one missed shift away
from being completely out of money and options?
What if
people with resources—people who went to college at a time when they
could pay for college without mountains of debt, or people whose parents
were fortunate enough to be able to save for them, on their
behalf—stopped chiding those without for their perceived poor decisions
and instead decided to actually address the problem, which is that this
is an economic climate wherein it is damn near impossible to get out of
poverty?
When we talk about
millennials, we can’t not talk about the debt that keeps us reigned in,
and the difficulty in getting out of it.
What if we
acknowledged that there are more poor people than we realize and that
even doing literally everything prescribed by those with wealth does not
guarantee wealth?
What if we stopped wringing our hands about the death of the middle class and did something to attempt to resuscitate it?
To
this day, I don’t “look poor.” I have a nice apartment, the right kind
of job, clothes that don’t look like I bought them all on clearance
years ago. But don’t let my appearance fool you—I’m that millennial who is ruining the economy with my choices.
I
don’t own a vehicle, and I likely won’t be anywhere near able to afford
homeownership until I’m well into my 30s (no matter how many people
tell me it’s “actually not that hard” to get together a down payment) in
no small part because I started my path to adulthood, as I was told to
do, at a five-figure deficit. And frequently, at the end of a pay
period, after paying rent and another $600 in student loans for the
privilege of becoming the first in my family to graduate from college,
I’m right back to being one unforeseen expense away from an overdraw.
I don’t look poor—most of us don’t—but that doesn’t mean a whole lot. This article originally appeared on Medium and was reposted with permission. Hanna
Brooks Olsen is a writer, small human, and a millennial. Her interests
are politics, podcasts, Pac-12 football, feminism, and Oxford commas.
She is curious to a fault.
Flickr/Mark Fischer - 
Flickr/COD Newsroom - 
