I have a very distinct memory from my first day of college: My family’s minivan slowly pulling into my dormitory’s parking lot, through a crowd of first-year students flanked by helicopter parents and, in retrospect, probably hungover orientation week advisers. I remember thinking “Hurry up! I’m ready to start my real life.”

I had no idea what I was really rushing towards.

As the only daughter of Nigerian immigrants with a tenuous-at-best toehold on the middle class, college was billed as the only path to financial security. “No one can ever take away your education,” my father would say repeatedly. While that may be true, two degrees later someone could take away my access to decent housing because of my shit credit, thanks to the nearly $60,000 in student loans I’ve essentially defaulted on since graduating from the University of Chicago and Northwestern University.

It seems a college education is part of the American dream that’s easy to buy (or borrow) into, but hard to pay off.

With tuition soaring, and the middle class shrinking along with their incomes, many students and their families are left holding incredibly expensive bags. In 2013, 69% of graduating seniors at public and private nonprofit colleges took out student loans to pay for college, and “about one-fifth of new graduates’ debt was in private loans,” according to the Project on Student Debt. Even public schools – long considered a more affordable option – are less accessible: public colleges increasingly rely on tuition dollars as state funding continues to fall (25% and 23%, respectively, in 2012, compared to 17% and 23% in 2003). The country’s cumulative student loan debt ($1.1tn) has surpassed car loans ($875bn) and credit card debt ($659bn). Though college graduates make more than their peers who only graduated from high school, for many, monthly student loans leach into that extra $17,500 in salary.

Yet the party line that college education is the middle class’ only hope for upward mobility persists – it will even be the message of President Obama’s last stop on his “SOTU Spoiler” tour in Knoxville, Tennessee.

“In today’s economy,” Dan Pfeiffer, the president’s senior advisor, wrote on Medium, “access to a college education is the surest ticket to the middle class — and the President’s proposals will help more young people punch that ticket.”

One of those proposals is to make student loans affordable and assign values to colleges based on their affordability, access and “outcomes” – such as whether or not people graduate and enter high-paying jobs or go on to get graduate degrees. These changes will perhaps make starry-eyed students less easily swayed than I was by the promise of reading Plato on the quad. Another is making the first two years of community college free for “anybody who’s willing to work for it,” as the President announced in a preview video on Thursday. A step in the right direction, but one that needs backing from a Republican Congress to happen. Without it, we’re back at square one: Graduates and incoming students signing up for the decades-long financial burden taking out student loans to fund your education all but ensures. (President Obama should know—he and the First Lady didn’t pay off their student loans until they were in their 40s.)

As someone who punched that ticket twice, I’m still waiting for my express bus to the middle class. The modest income I make as an entrepreneur with a day job is whittled away each month thanks to loan payments (plus interest) to various financial intuitions that feel more like bounty hunters than supporters of middle-class aspirants.

With that $60,000 in student loans hanging over me, I’m still waiting to start the “real” life I’d always imagined for myself. It’s just that now I want one with its possibilities a little less hampered by student debt.