I am a geek. That has already been established purely by the existence of this blog. I am also very typical of the American woman my age. Middle class, over-educated, under-appreciated, with a husband, a cat, and a lot of bills to pay. I believe that my current financial position of getting by paycheck to paycheck is in part the fault of my geek status.

Allow me to explain.

I attended St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN. This was the most expensive of the schools I looked at toward the end of high school, but it was the one I had to go to, no compromise, because of what it offered. My first year of schooling was $28,000. By the time I graduated the yearly tuition had increased to $38,000. That’s a $10,000 increase in four years. Frightening, right?

St. Olaf’s neighboring school, Carleton, located in the same small Minnesota town, cost roughly the same, but had a very different focus for its students than St. Olaf. Carleton was for the professionals, the kids wanting to become doctors and layers and corporate schmucks. St. Olaf was for the artists, the activists, and the geeks.

Geeks are always going to be more interested in the types of subjects a Liberal Arts college offers, like Art, Asian Studies, English, Film, Theatre, a class on graphic novels (yep, they had one) etc., but unless you are truly lucky and get an internship or a job in one of those fields you love right off the bat, it is almost impossible to break in.

Usually, you end up with a humdrum job that only allows you to get your geek out on rare occasions. Where does that leave you overall? With a great education, a lot of debt, and very little to show for it.

The debt comes in where the title of this article gets its clever name: being part of the upper/lower middle class. Not all geeks fall into that category, that would be generalizing, but the majority do because that is also the majority of the population in the US.

Let me tell you how you run into a problem like I did. No other college could have compared to St. Olaf for me for many reasons, a couple of those being that I could create my own major and travel the world.

St. Olaf has a program called the Center for Integrative Studies, where, with a lot of extra effort, you can design your own major that combines aspects of various other majors into one.

Mine was Creative Writing for Text & Screen, a look at media culture and storytelling in film verses the written word, and how both can tell the same story well. And that’s only my example. Plenty of other students used this program to create many other various and interesting majors.

The study abroad programs were also very impressive at St. Olaf. I wanted to study film in England. I did. I also got to spend a month in China and Japan since I doubled as an Asian Studies major. I could not have had those experiences in the same way if I had attended a different school.

And to top it all off, I met my husband at St. Olaf. I have no regrets.

However, finances were tight for me in college and they still are. My parents made too much money to get enough Federal aid for me, but they had too much debt to actually help me pay for anything, leaving me with a lot of loans to pay off once I was finished with school. That’s the main problem, when your parents make too much for you to get the money you need, but they don’t make enough to pay for the tuition out of pocket (which isn’t necessarily your parents’ duty anyway).

This trend makes paying for college hardest not for the rich (naturally, because they can pay upfront), not for the poor, because they get the help they need, but for those of us in between.

The worst is that, seeing as how I am not in that small percentage that got right into one of the fields they love or sold that screenplay or got that best seller published, I barely make enough to cover my monthly fees.
 
 
Now, my husband and I manage because we are very careful about how we budget and we understand that if things are really tight then we have to be frugal and give up going to movies, or buying new clothes, or eating out. Not everyone is so lucky to manage like that without having to make more drastic cuts. Some people only have themselves to help pay off their debts, and may even have to live off their parents for a lot longer than they ever wanted to.

Situations like that happen often enough that geeks have a bad rap for being totally socially inept people who have to live off their parents until they are 40, never marry, and are greasy and disgusting, which is not a fair conclusion at all. Sometimes it is simply about survival and Mom and Dad are the only way to go.

I don’t believe it should have to be this way. FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid), and whatever formula the government uses to determine who gets what amount of aid, needs to be reevaluated, because the large debt effecting our economy today is not only caused by irresponsible people with credit cards.

Sometimes those of us with the most debt simply wanted an education that could lead us toward our dream job, and we shouldn’t be punished just because the dream doesn’t always work out. It’s one of the reasons I started this blog.
 
 
Why not try and make a little money from writing about things I love?

Not that I am making any real money right now, but it is an investment and something I enjoy working on every week, so why not? I know I could do more to work on my original fiction projects that I would love to sell and make some real money on, but I am certainly not sitting on my rear here, and I’m betting most of you aren’t either. Unfortunately, that does not mean that any of us are better off.

While preparing for this blog I spent some time looking for statistics about liberal arts majors having more debt, and while the numbers alluded me, articles did not.

Advantages and disadvantages of small private colleges and a liberal arts education lists the larger amount of debt for liberal arts students as a major drawback.

I also stumbled upon an article from the Marquette Tribune online, Marquette University‘s college paper, by a liberal arts major discussing how job fairs need to accommodate liberal arts majors more, not just:

“financial managers, mechanical engineers, IT project managers, tax interns and team leaders.”

The responses this reporter got for her article were all horribly rude, telling her that liberal arts majors need to go back in time and major in something else so they can get real jobs someday. Yeah, that’s a healthy outlook for life, let’s make sure all the creative people conform to doing math problems for the rest of their lives instead of creating something. I’m sorry, but different people exist to love different professions for a reason, so that we can all find careers centered around doing something we love.

Now, I know that my observations here about geeks, their education, and what becomes of them after the fact does not include every geek out there. If you’re a tech geek, for example, there are plenty of schools that won’t break the bank that can teach you whatever skills you may be lacking or certifications you may require to get a high-paying job. But not all geeks are techies and I think people forget that sometimes (curse you Computer Science and that one ‘C’ to mar my GPA!)

I was happy to stumble upon an article (older but still pertinent) that gave examples of ways we could help students avoid staggering debt, geeks or otherwise.

Slate Magazine‘s article “Loan Ranger: The way Americans pay for college is a mess. Here’s how to fix it” explains a program already used by other countries that asks graduates to pay depending on their income instead of just having to pay a flat, impossible fee every month. I hope that by the time I have kids, if that ever comes to pass, that the way college is paid for is different.

For those of us who went for a Bachelor of Arts of some kind because that’s what we love, and getting that dream job hasn’t quite happened yet, it can be hard to pay the bills, harder for us than for almost anyone else, because we can’t get the help we need but barely get by with what we have. It sucks and this economy is not making it easier.

My advice? Don’t count out that BA or whatever other geeky endeavor you pursued in your past if it fulfilled you in any way. I wouldn’t change my education or what came of it for anything.

But while I am waiting to sell that screenplay, and novel, and comic book idea, and my husband still prays to get a game tester job someday, being smart with your budget and accepting help from Mom and Dad when you have to is really all people like us can do to stay ahead when that debt starts getting us down.

Hopefully, in the near future, I can replace my laptop as I so direly need to, and pay off some more of those compounding loans. If you feel my pain, let me hear about it. Coz geeks like us, unless we’re lucky, and many of us are not, just keep getting the shaft if we’re not in IT. And sometimes even then. It’s a tough world out there, folks. Hang in there.

On Monday it’s time to honor a more extreme form of facilitating your geek side: getting tattoos. Besides my own geek-related tattoos that I will be discussing, I will also be covering some of the many other geeky possibilities that people put on their bodies these days. Join me for “Geek Tattoos”. They’re permanent. And they’re awesome.

Thanks for tuning in.

Images taken from:
http://degreedirectory.org/articles/Liberal_Arts_and_Humanities_OpenCourseWare_University_Rankings.html
http://www.jobprofiles.org/library/guidance/geek-dream-jobs.htm
http://www.gsitetv.com/
http://www.ehow.com/how_4544394_minimize-student-loan-debt.html
http://www.pantherqin.com/blog/?p=69
http://tapenoisediary.com/2008/06/25/the-myth-of-the-dream-job/

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