Economic Hardship and Reporting Project - The Ones We've Lost: The Student Loan Debt Suicides

The Economic Hardship and Reporting Project provided me with a grant several months ago to write an in-depth article about the student lending crisis. My editors were Barbara Ehrenreich and Gary Rivlin. Here's the piece. I hope you'll share with your networks, because this is the dark side of the student lending crisis and the public needs to be aware of how bad things have gotten for student loan debtors. This is a national emergency and it needs to be solved now.


Here's a snippet:

This story was produced by the independent Economic Hardship Reporting Project, co-edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Gary Rivlin.

One evening in 2007, Jan Yoder of Normal, Illinois noticed that her son Jason seemed more despondent than usual. Yoder had been a graduate student in organic chemistry at Illinois State University but after incurring $100,000 in student loan debt, he struggled to find a job in his field. Later that night, Jason, 35, left the family's mobile home. Concerned about her son's mood, Jan Yoder decided in the early morning hours to go look for him on campus, where a professor she ran into joined her in the search. The two of them discovered his body in one of the labs on campus and called campus police at 8:30AM. 32 minutes later, Jason was declared dead due to nitrogen asphyxiation.

 Read the rest of the story here.