Putting a face on the student debt crisis

We’ve all heard the staggering numbers on student loan debt in the United States. At one trillion dollars and climbing, it is second only to mortgage debt when it comes to burning a hole in the nation’s household finances. 

While lawmakers debate how best to tackle the crisis, actor turned activist Aaron Calafato is doing his part to cut it down to size with For Profit —a one-act play exploring his journey through both sides of the student debt crisis.  

“One trillion dollars in student debt is such a complex issue,” Calafato told Real Money. “I think that when people see a human face, a human experience, they’re more likely to take action.”

Calafato’s experience began when he could no longer defer the $70,000 in student loans he’d taken out to earn his Bachelor’s in communications. He and his wife, a social worker, owed a combined $1,200 a month in student loan payments—a debt burden that forced Calafato to abandon a budding acting career in New York and return home to Ohio.  “There was a great defeat within me because I’d made such progress in my field and at that time the student debt inhibited me from moving forward because of how much we owed,” he said.

The only work Calafato could find was as an admissions advisor at a for profit university—a job which would eventually inspire his one man show. “Here’s the truth,” he tells his audience. “I took a job as an admissions advisor at a for profit institution. I enrolled students. I put them into debt in order to pay off my own student debt.”

It’s a stark admission—one which he hopes will draw his audience into a broader discussion on student debt. “By entering this world with me, you can start seeing my world specifically at this school but then you start seeing what I saw on a larger scale which is boy, we’ve turned higher education into a used car sales lot,” he said. 

Touring college campuses, Calafato collects a flat $900 fee per performance so his largely student audience can watch free of charge. 

Having staged For Profit more than fifty times across six states, he’s now taking his campaign national with #outwithstudentdebt, an online open collaborative art project launched through Student Debt Crisis, a non-profit he co-founded and devotes thirty hours a week to without getting paid.

Encouraging people to share their stories of how student debt has impacted their lives, #outwithstudent debt has been steadily populated with videos of Americans struggling to cope with their student loan obligations. “The idea is if we can collect enough stories that we can use sort of a larger video as a tool to show to our leaders,” he told Real Money.  “We are exploiting our students. I mean, how else can you explain putting the majority of students in unreasonable debt that they can’t pay off and then expecting them to drive the economy. Expecting them to buy homes, expecting them to buy cars, expecting them to contribute to small businesses. How can they do that when they have thousands and then if you multiply that nationally, trillions of dollars in student debt. How can you do that? That’s a value choice and that’s happening.”

Charts from Household Debt and Credit: Student Debt, by Donghoon Lee, February 28, 2013