"Student loans are crippling millions of people. Imagine starting a race, and then the guy with the starter pistol uses the gun to shoot you in the leg."
Being a college student is expensive. That's why so many students end up starving. Unfortunately, the problems don't end with graduation. In fact, for many people, the problems begin there.
Suddenly, a person can be landed with a lot of debt from both private and government sources with only A Degree in Useless to show for it. And that's if they even got that far; they may be a Tragic Dropout. How they respond will depend on the plot, but it's common for these people to become a Justified Criminal. That's how they end up being Only in It for the Money.
This is a common way to garner sympathy for your protagonist. As The One Who Made It Out suggests, college is viewed as one way for an impoverished person to ascend social ranks, but it's not as simple as that. Debt particularly affects low-income people, both for obvious reasons and inexperience with financial systems. As a result, student debt is often used as a shorthand for someone who is ambitious and talented but hampered by social inequality and has to resort to increasingly extreme measures. They may become a Burger Fool, an Almighty Janitor, get landed with a Soul-Crushing Desk Job or a Soul-Sucking Retail Job, or end up in circumstances to say I Was Young and Needed the Money.
This is not an exclusively American trope, but it is a majority American trope because, in many other countries, college tuition is publicly funded, and due to the association between college education and The American Dream. It's also one of The Newest Ones in the Book: until the Reagan Administration, while tuition wasn't free, it was subsidized to where you could easily cover the remainder with a part-time job at minimum wage (which was also much higher relative to the cost of living). Furthermore, interest rates have rocketed since The Great Recession so even being a Scholarship Student isn't enough to save you from debt. It can affect parents and family members as well as the students or former students themselves. Since British higher education was reformed in The '90s and formerly free tuition supported by outright living grants is a thing of the past, the rocketing costs of tuition fees and even basic living expenses—now covered by long-term loans on the American model—are causing more and more problems and hardship to graduates.
Compare Healthcare Motivation, which is another trope that will commonly involve people going above and beyond for a necessity.
Though this is Truth in Television for a lot of people, depending on the story, there may be an element of Artistic License – Education in the treatment of financial aid.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Exaggerated in Kakegurui, where the debt comes from having an entire school based on gambling. Less proficient students get suckered into enormous amounts of debt. It's revealed that student gamblers can end up owing their entire lives to the Absurdly Powerful Student Council, who will determine every move they make in adulthood.
Film — Live-Action
- Emily the Criminal: Emily has a mountain of student debt from going to art school and dropping out after she got in legal trouble for beating up her abusive boyfriend. It gets her suckered into L.A.'s criminal underworld as she becomes more embittered from the fact that she can never even pay off her interest and so becomes more vicious as she accepts that Life Isn't Fair.
- He Never Died: Jeremy kicks off the plot by borrowing money from a loan shark to pay off his student loans. The loan shark then comes to find him after he falls behind on payments, but they find Jack instead and try to intimidate him into telling them.
- In Half Moon Street, Sigourney Weaver plays a graduate student at a university in London who is trapped by debt and poverty and has to moonlight as a high-class escort girl to make ends meet and to address her own financial woes. This leads to life-threatening problems for her when she gets too deeply involved with a mysterious client.
- Knives Out: Harlan Thrombey generously funds his granddaughter Meg's college education (in what's implied to be A Degree in Useless) by giving checks to her mother, Joni. Unfortunately, Joni has actually been embezzling those checks for herself and, upon hearing that Harlan plans to cut her (and by extension Meg) off, confesses that she's squandered all of the money and won't be able to pay for Meg's schooling any longer. The prospect of falling into massive debt to get a degree that doesn't guarantee a job terrifies Meg, giving her a motive for Harlan's murder.
- The Last Starfighter: A minor subplot early in the film has Alex trying to take out a loan to go away to college which, even in The '80s, is prohibitively expensive for a trailer park kid whose single mom is a waitress. Shortly after he gets the top score on the Last Starfighter video game cabinet, his mom comes home with a rejection letter.
Literature
- Legally Brunette: Mina, a lawyer just starting out, takes some cases because they have tons of cash and she has student debt, such as in Chapter 69:
she was about to free herself from the shackles of student debt
- The Creeping Charlies: The Charlies are trapped in the literally poisonous town of Charogne Falls because Collette and Pierre's parents can't move due to their student debt unless they find a relative to live with.
- The Hole We're In:
- The Pomroys were in a stable, middle-class position until patriarch Roger took a serious pay cut to do his PhD. This one decision ends up spiraling them into debt, causing George to illegally take out loans in her son Vincent's name.
- Due to the above, the only way Patsy can afford to go to college is by enlisting on the GI bill. Then The War on Terror begins, and she ends up being sent to Iraq. By the time she comes back, she's pregnant, still struggling to get college financed (and never really manages it), and living with severe PTSD.
- The Name of the Wind: The protagonist Kvothe starts out as a penniless urchin and finds that the University doesn't issue loans, forcing him to get tuition money from a black-market Loan Shark. Her real goal is to force him to sneak her into the University archives, but he's able to repay her in cash with some ingenuity and plenty of Triple Shifter work.
- Exaggerated in Poor Man's Fight, where the debt owed to corporate overlords for studying is established by the Test. Tanner bombs it, which leads to him having to join the military to Work Off the Debt. He ends up accidentally discovering evidence that the corporations have been rigging the tests for decades to deliberately test students on their weakest subjects in order to saddle them with extra-large debts, leading to the Debtor's War as his homeworld's government uses the evidence to declare student debts null and void and the corporations retaliate with military force.
- Room: A minor example. Ma says that she does the interview to get money for "Jack's college fund" (he's five). The interview goes badly, and after the interviewer suggests that Ma should've given Jack up for adoption, she attempts suicide. This results in Ma and Jack being separated for the last act.
Live-Action TV
- Evil: Kristen only joins David's team because she needs to pay off her student loans while raising her daughters. This leads to a lot of heartbreak for her.
- Family Matters was one of the first shows to address the rising costs of colleges and the dangers of student loans. Laura achieves her lifelong dream of getting into Harvard University, but, in an aversion of Ivy League for Everyone, can't afford tuition on scholarships alone. She's also ineligible for financial aid because her parents make too much money to apply—but when Carl tries to get a loan at the bank, he learns that he doesn't make enough money to qualify for one, meaning that there's no way for Laura to attend Harvard without sending the family into massive debt. When he breaks the bad news to Harriette, Laura inadvertently overhears and, after breaking down crying for a moment, tells her parents that she's decided not to go to Harvard on the pretense that she doesn't want to move that far away.
- In Fargo: Season Five, Indira Olmstead's money problems began with her student loans. At first, she was able to pay her own way through college, but then her college tuition went up and she was forced to take out loans to keep up. By the time she graduated, she had a small mountain of debt, which only grew worse when she married her idiotic husband Lars and discovered that he had his own debts to pay off.
- Invoked in Honeys. One of the ways that Reika shows herself to be morally better than her employers is that she disagrees with advertising debt to students, who are vulnerable as they can't borrow from anywhere else.
- Last Man Standing (2011): Ryan's student debt is one of his defining characteristics. He ran out on Kristin and their young son only to earn a BA in history and can only get a job as a beer truck driver. He harbors a lot of resentment for what he sees as the repression of the working man, but it's his own idleness that put him in this position.
- Northern Exposure: Joel Fleischman made a deal with the state of Alaska that he would work there for four years in exchange for med school tuition. While he had expected to be assigned to a modern hospital in a city like Juneau, he instead ends up as the sole family practitioner in the remote town of Cicely, where he is forced to stay or be saddled with a mountain of debt.
- Scrubs: The episode "My Fruit Cups" deals with the debt doctors get into after medical school. Turk and JD are forced to steal supplies and pick up extra shifts to make ends meet. The episode's conflict begins when JD learns that Turk cheated him out of money for a shift they worked. Meanwhile, Elliot's father pays her debt off on the condition she become an OBGYN. When she refuses, he cuts her off.
- Played with in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. Bruce encourages Jen to use her Hulk powers more often after she realizes she has them. She resists, saying she wants to go back to law and have a regular job so she can pay off her "mountain of student loans." This allows the plot to progress as it was as she keeps being a lawyer, but cuts off a potential plot line of Jen being She-Hulk more often.
- Veronica Mars: Used to justify California University and to continue Everyone Went to School Together in Season 3. Veronica got into Stanford in Season 2, but her Alcoholic Parent Liane stole her college fund after Veronica put it up for rehab. As a result, she has to go to Hearst because of the lower costs and since she got an academic scholarship. This is hand-waved in the movie, which reveals that Veronica transferred to Stanford after her first year at Hearst.
Tabletop Games
- Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: The journeyman wizard Janna Colburg is so desperate to pay off her debts to the College of Magic that she's plotting to burgle a silver warehouse — never mind her total lack of non-academic life experience.
Video Games
- Saints Row (2022): In contrast to the other games in the series, the Younger and Hipper Gen Z cast turns to crime in order to pay off their student loans, and frequently worry about making payments in time.
- Borderlands The Presequel: The background for one of the six Vault Hunters, Timothy Lawrence, is that he was a struggling drama student with loans to pay off. He unfortunately ended up making a contract with Jack, surgically altered to act as his Doppelgänger for twenty years.
Visual Novels
- Being A ΔΙΚ: A variant, since it's about paying for school. Maya's primary plot revolves around her desperately wanting to join Eta Omicron Tau after hearing a rumour that they pay for tuition. Episode 6 reveals the reason for her desperation: she is in dire financial straits because her father Patrick exploited her trust in him to have her co-sign a loan with him on terms that let him control all the money, allowing her access to it only if she stops seeing her girlfriend Josy.
Webcomics
- The Dragon Doctors: Tanica, a Trsanti assassin whom Sarin accidentally turned into a tree, revealed that she resorted to joining the Trsanti to pay off her student loans.
- Zortic: The original version started with
Zortic meeting a Jabba the Hutt expy about his outstanding debts, the punchline revealing they're student loans. Leading him to enter the game show where he wins the starship Entire Prize.
Web Video
- Lindsay Ellis has spoken about her problems while studying at, and after graduating from, USC, where student debt caused a rift in her working relationship with Channel Awesome.
Thing is, around this time, I made another huge mistake (haha joke [haha... sort of a joke]) when I got accepted to USC. I say "huge mistake" because being young and dumb, I didn't realize that 7% interest rate on student loans was... a lot. And a MFA at the world's top film school (since usurped but it was rated #1 at the time!) takes super huge priority over internet videos, even if they paid okay.
- Total Forgiveness is a show on Dropout where Grant O'Brien and Ally Beardsley do increasingly insane things in return for winning money paid to their student loans. A few examples of the things asked of them include wearing a shock collar that goes off every time you speak for an entire day, sleeping with a snake in your bed, spending a day in a coffin, poorly singing the national anthem for an entire stadium, and pitching a pyramid scheme to your roommates.
Western Animation
- Amphibia: "The Plantars Check In" features Bella the Bellhop, who despite her four years of study at the prestigious Newtopia University, has been forced to get an exhausting but low paying job as a Bellhop due to the huge debts her studies brought. leaving her so broke that her lunch consists of bread with ice cubes as filling. This leads her to attempt to steal the "Royal Credit Card" that King Andrias gave to the Plantars, intending to use its unlimited funds to pay off the debt and finally start enjoying her life. She eventually sees the error of her ways, but Sprig manages to take advantage of the King's favour to force her boss to give her a raise so that she can start paying off the debts.
- The Simpsons: According to "22 Short Films About Springfield", Snake Jailbird turned to a life of crime to pay off his student loans. He went to Middlebury College, one of the most expensive colleges in the world.
