There wasn’t a lot about college that had me worried. My intelligence felt like an undeniable fact; after all, I’d been raised by two parents brilliant enough to lift our family from below the poverty line to a comfortably middle class existence with a house and two cars a mere 15 years after we had immigrated from India. Even before acceptance letters started rolling in, I knew I’d thrive on my seemingly predestined path to upward mobility. Each yes was another fork in a choose-your-own-adventure that led to the same ending: the American Dream.

NYU was my second choice. I didn’t get into my first, the University of Pennsylvania. UPenn was the perfect choice on paper for both me and my parents: a cheaper in-state tuition, Ivy League education, and beautiful campus that was just the right distance from home. Despite a stellar interview, I found myself in the spring of my senior year of high school with an acceptance letter (early admission in NYU’s case) to every college I applied to expect UPenn. I hadn’t pictured going anywhere else, but despite the disappointing and abrupt change of course, I had options. Yet, unlike most of my friends, my choice wasn’t one that was simply determined by my happiness.

Sorting through my stack of financial aid packages from different universities forced me to admit what I had already known while falling in love with NYU on the campus tour: I couldn’t afford to go there. At the time, it was one of the most expensive colleges in the country, and the intervening years have only caused NYU to move further up that list, sitting at $69,984 for the 2018-2019 school year.

Each yes was another fork in a choose-your-own-adventure that led to the same ending: the American Dream

Considered a "New Ivy" (arbitrarily labeled, in the same way Manhattan real estate agents make up neighborhood names to move more apartments at higher rents), NYU pulled out all the stops to qualify its skyrocketing tuition fees. A main campus located in the Village, the historic beating heart of creatives and industry titans for centuries! A collegiate experience that lacked the traditional iron gates and boundaries of a New England Ivy, meaning it blended seamlessly (or so I thought until I learned about gentrification) into the city and people around it! And if that wasn’t enough, try one of our 14 international campuses!

This endless expanse of intellectual paradise and professional expertise would only cost me $138,670 in loans after the $48,000 of merit scholarships NYU awarded me. My potential bachelor’s degree in who-the-fuck-knows-yet came to a whopping total of $186,670.

That was the same sticker price my parents had paid for our three-bedroom home in Monroeville, Pennsylvania four years earlier.

To their credit, there’s nothing my parents would rather spend money on than an education. It’s what brought us to America in 1992, and five years later my father was armed with a Ph.D. in spectroscopy and the deep belief that America would provide us with opportunities that India could not. While my mother wanted me to attend somewhere in state, it wasn’t because of the money (she was an equal breadwinner in our family, hard at work as a project manager for an environmental firm with millions of dollars in government contracts), she simply wanted her daughter nearby.

My father, on the other hand, pushed me hard towards NYU, sensing something I couldn’t bring myself to articulate. I wanted to go there. But I knew it was irresponsible considering that the loans we’d have to take out ($103,445 in my parents' name, $35,225 in my name) would force my family’s tentative grasp on the lower rung of the middle class to slip. I dithered, making what I thought at the time to be mature, responsible pro/con lists and trying to convince myself that a Penn State or Pitt College experience would be just as satisfying. But in the end, my dad pulled me aside to talk through the FAFSA process and pointed out that with my scholarship at NYU and the lack of financial aid at in-state colleges, the tuition costs at least evened out.

Armed with that knowledge, and my incredible naiveté on what affordable room and board looked like in one of the most expensive cities in the world, I enrolled at NYU where I spent the next four years wondering what the fuck I’d do with my college degree and loving every minute of it.

The terrifying twinge I felt as I watched my parents drive away after moving me into my freshman year dorm didn’t crop up again till after graduation. In May 2010, I graduated with a dubious degree (Bachelor of Science in Media, Culture, and Communication), a prospective career goal that seemed to be based more in luck than skill (screenwriting), and a job as a production assistant that frankly, a trained monkey could do. I worked 60-80 hours a week answering phones, driving around lazy producers, and getting lunch for grown ass adults who threw temper tantrums on par with the rowdiest elementary school class for the fire sale price of $600 a week (which after taxes looked closer to $475 ). For two years I dug into savings to make rent, bills, and pay for basics like food and toiletries. My student loan payments at the time were laughably small compared to my credit card debt now, a couple hundred a month, but I was already on the brink. My parents, deeply concerned that I was eating into savings from high school and college jobs to keep myself afloat, threw me a life raft that cost me more than my actual student loans.

They paid off the entire sum.

By rolling their Parent Plus Loans as well as my Stafford and Perkins loans into their mortgage, their bank paid off Sallie Mae in its entirety. Mom and Dad now owed Dollar Bank every single cent of my college education (in addition to two mortgages, and all their credit card loans), albeit at (brilliantly! low!) interest rate of 5.74 percent rather than Sallie Mae’s 8 percent.

At first, the deal was I paid them back monthly however much I could, but after a few months where I had nothing to spare, they encouraged me to save and invest my money for my future instead of worrying about our collective past.

I felt sick. This number that felt only theoretical throughout college and for the first few years out was suddenly crushingly real. I had chosen to put myself and my parents into debilitating debt, and for what? Because everyone else was doing it too? Because it’s a necessary, but not always advantageous, step for those who want to make something of themselves? What exactly had those four years given me other than an excuse to drink and write and make movies in a creative hotbed the likes of which I had never experienced before? The irony of my college degree is that it had yet to help solve any of the financial realities of being an adult.

I had chosen to put myself and my parents into debilitating debt, and for what?

The thought that I’d be in debt for pretty much the rest of my life was a reality that I could stomach when my enabler had been a faceless corporation. But my new debtors had encouraged me even when they didn’t understand me, nursed me through childhood insecurities, and abandoned the safety of their families and country to provide me with a path in life that had been inaccessible to them. This new reality crushed me.

But it motivated me too. I had the immense privilege of living debt-free, and I was doing nothing with it other than making copies and getting verbally abused by men 20 years my senior. I needed to find a way to write and make money, and I needed to do it fast. After three fruitless years in film and TV production I got a job at BuzzFeed and eventually made my way into a relatively lucrative journalism gig.

My dad called to check in last week and instead of his usual opener ("How sweaty and disgusting is Brooklyn right now?") he said he was proud of me. Not unusual in my family, but odd in the fact that it wasn’t prompted by a promotion or a new gig. Surprised, I teased him until he managed to express his feelings in more than a sentence.

"You’ve gone so much farther at 29 than I could have ever dreamed of."

That lump of fear and culpability I felt watching my parents drive away after dropping me off for college freshman year immediately suffocated me. I now make more money than my mom and will make more than my dad in the next three to five years. And I have yet to repay even a fraction of the costs they took on for me. In their eyes it doesn’t matter because I’m doing something that I feel is important, and doing it well. I’m on a career track, and at least if the industry I’m in isn’t steady, the goals I’m working towards are. At this point, nearly a decade out from graduation, they don’t even need the money.

In what I can only describe as a Herculean effort, they’ve paid off their entire loan: their mortgage, credit card bills, and my college education. The only things they want is security in their retirement —which they haven’t saved enough for due to clearing debt— and my happiness.

You’ve gone so much farther at 29 than I could have ever dreamed of.

Now, at 29, I live student loan free, with a good salary, in a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. It is, objectively, and actually, the good life I always dreamed of for myself. But being able to enjoy it is another thing entirely. Every financial move I make is dictated not by how I can secure my future, but rather, how I can provide for my parents when they aren’t working anymore. I fantasize about landing a six-figure prestige journalism gig, or selling a book, perhaps a lauded Sundance film or pilot, not as a way to boost my own notoriety, but instead in desperate bids to make a large sum of cash. Fast.

My dad laughs every time I hint at this. He asks for a wishlist of ridiculous things: a Tesla 3, the Koh-i-Noor diamond, the impeachment of Trump. My mom always tells me that I should worry more about myself than them. But I can only be who they raised me to be. And as my parents’ daughter, I finally understand the real cost of success: The pressure to do right by those who did right by me.

In my parents' case repayment probably won’t be the $186,670 NYU cost us. But a pair of first-class open tickets around the world? A smaller, and newer house in New Jersey so they’re not so far away? Doubling their nest egg so they never have to worry about money again? Those are not the goals they envisioned for me, but they’re the goals our debt created and the ones I’m fervently chasing. As my parents' child, I know I can survive financial insecurity. I’ve seen them do it. What I can’t survive is the thought of not doing everything possible to make their remaining years as rosy a picture of the American Dream as they have made mine. Rarely do immigrants who risk it all get to enjoy the returns. But as a Mallikarjuna, I know how to turn the impossible into the achievable, so trust that we’re gonna get ours.

Krutika Mallikarjuna is currently the Features Editor at TV Guide (dot com). You can find more of her writing at BuzzFeed, Teen Vogue, Inverse, and of course, in drunk live-tweet form @krutika.



Read more in Shondaland's week long series on the student loan crisis here.

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