Engineering undergraduates should not be charged fees. They should receive grants, not student loans, and the government will get the money back long-term from increased exports.
Debt certainly isn't always a bad thing. A mortgage can help you afford a home. Student loans can be a necessity in getting a good job. Both are investments worth making, and both come with fairly low interest rates.
I understand the challenge with student loans. But what about the labor force, the enlisted men and women, so to speak, of ships. Those who work with their hands and their minds. We need to do what we do in the military, is we train and retrain.
I know what it's like to be faced with student loans, to have rent so high you don't know if you're ever going to be able to save up and buy a home. The issues the people of my generation are going through are natural for me because I've lived them, my friends are living them.
When SoFi launched in 2011, it focused squarely on the burgeoning student loan market - a market that, unlike housing, had no viable option to refinance both federal and private student loans from higher interest-rate eras.
When I went back to New Hampshire after graduating from law school, my plan was to go work for a private firm because I had to pay some student loans off and make money and really just be in the private practice of law. Which can be very rewarding.
I'm here not just as an actress but as a woman, an African-American, a granddaughter of Ellis Island immigrants, a person who could not have afforded college without the help of student loans and as one of millions of volunteers working to re-elect President Obama!