~~April 24, 2019 2:58 PM~~

On Monday, presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren unveiled her plan to completely eliminate student debt and make college free.

It's a terrible, financially infeasible idea, which is something that has been pointed out many times over by the more economically literate among us. So, I'd like to ask a different question instead: How did we get here in the first place? How is it that so many young people do have so much debt?

My answer: They were encouraged to take out loans that they could not afford in the first place. They should have known that they didn't stand a chance of paying these loans back, but because our culture told them that they should anyway, they did — and that's wrong.

For some reason, our culture is one that preaches that furthering your education is something that is always worth the price tag, and the truth is, that simply isn't the case.

I know this from experience.

At the end of my senior year of college — which, by the way, I funded mostly through the combination of a modest loan, working, and busting my ass hard enough to earn a full-tuition scholarship, with only a little bit of help from my parents for the first semester only — I found out that I had been accepted into Columbia University's graduate school of journalism. The only Ivy League journalism school in the nation! To say I was elated would be an understatement. It had been my goal since childhood to attend this exact school, and I could not believe that I had actually been accepted.