The New York Times has an article about Alexandra Jarrin. Alexandra has spent the last couple years on unemployment. She exhausted her benefits and now is struggling to make it day to day. She has a college degree and was working on her masters but ultimately lost her job as “Director of client services†in March of 2008.
It’s always quite interesting to read about someone’s personal situation and I found myself feeling sorry for Alexandra. She has clearly exhausted pretty much all of her options, including handouts from friends.
Personal observations/opinions:
It kind of feels like Alexandra bought in to the illusion that simply getting a degree would drastically improve her odds of being employed. Unfortunately, just having a degree doesn’t necessarily solve any problems for her. At her age, I think her work experience is probably even more important and that didn’t generate $92K in debt (like her college did). Don’t get me wrong. I admire her for being so motivated to get a degree while working and I don’t want to discount the effort she put in to it. I’m just saying that I think she may have been better off avoiding the college debt and trying to improve her skills through less expensive ways. Now she is unemployed and has a $92K bill that is pretty much going to follow her for the rest of her life since it normally can’t be forgiven via bankruptcy etc. As she misses payments on the debt the fees will cause the balance to increase even further.
Like I said earlier, I feel bad for her. She tried to do the right thing and is now finding herself in a desperate situation.
Anyway, it’s definitely an article worth reading. Go check it out.