“I simply conventional that I will supply the government $500 a month till I die,” she stated. “I never see how I could seize upon these loans.” Prokott likes her task as an instructor at Century High School in Rochester, Minn. With a decade’s experience teaching and two grasp tiers, she makes approximately $70,000 yearly. Her current earnings-primarily based scholar loan payments are $400 to $500 monthly. Her loans totaled $84,000 after graduate school eight years in the past. The hobby has ballooned Prokott’s loan debt to approximately $96,000. Most teachers fear their loan debt because of the career’s high training requirements and relatively low pay, in line with a 2017 NPR survey. After graduating from St. Michael-Albertville High School in 2000, Prokott stated it turned into a “computerized choice” to wait for university. She loved the faculty.
But as a first-generation university pupil, she said, Prokott couldn’t rely on her dad and mom for a recommendation. Her excessive faculty wasn’t a great deal of help, either, she introduced. “God bless St. Michael, but the counselors had been not very beneficial in terms of coaching about scholarships for any possibilities apart from simply sending in the software,” she said. “And I failed to navigate any of that online.” She enrolled at Winona State University, doing away with loans to pay for the maximum of her education and protecting down jobs as she attended faculty. She graduated in 2004 with an English diploma and about $11,000 in debt.
Next step: a graduate application in creative writing at Minnesota State University Mankato. She changed into granting a coaching assistantship in the software, which covered most of her training. She took out loans for residing expenses because she couldn’t find a cowl with extra component-time work. Prokkott said Mankato’s 3-year software added $24,000 to her debt load. She finished in 2007 and struggled to find paintings amid the nationwide financial recession. “It took a while to discover an activity,” she said. “I needed to be on unemployment for some time.” A Mankato spokesperson said the college offers support and steering, which includes loan counseling after leaving school, to assist students in “making fiscally responsible choices concerning their education.”
Winona State additionally gives students financial sources, a faculty spokesperson stated, and works with lawmakers to decrease tuition costs. Prokott got an internship with Graywolf Press after graduating from Mankato. But complete-time paid paintings became difficult to return, even with a grasp’s diploma. “It’s become a difficult time. And then you start to sense responsible properly. There’s all this pressure,” she stated. “Like, ‘Why did you essential in English? You deserve this happening to you. You ought to have a notion about this long-term.’ So there’s also that emotional burden regarding following what you like to do, which is quite provoking.”
She stated her frustration with locating a job led her to join the graduate faculty again, this time at Winona State, where she pursued a coaching degree. She discovered software in which she took two summers of lessons plus a yr of coaching while also taking classes. The hours were brutal and added to her debt burden, Prokott said. However, it changed into worth it. “Teaching is an obvious, marketable career,” she said. “You recognize what you will get to; you already know what task you are moving into. And so it was useful to have this sort of clear aim and the particular job.”
Prokott worked teaching jobs at Hutchinson and Wayzata schools between 2009 and 2013, earlier than at Century High. She earned her trainer’s license in 2009 and went lower back to finish the very last credits for the grasp’s diploma in 2011. However, Prokott said she’s possibly at her peak salary of $70,000 a year. While she’s doing OK financially, she said, she’s sour about her debt levels. She said she believes the government must do more to help people who work in a public service subject like training. “I suggest if it turned into as much as me,” she said, guffawing, “I’d as an alternative burn $400 and simply watch the cash burn than supply it to the government.”
