This week Nason FKA Carly talks to Nikki about her experience navigating a for-profit education to the artist she is today. Nason shares the radically transparent story of the Parent Plus loans that are overwhelming her family and explains why student debt is specifically a queer issue.

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Transcript –

Nikki Nolan: Welcome to the podcast! It’s so good to have you here.

Nason: Yay. I’m so happy to be here.

Nikki Nolan: So, we’re going to jump right into this. How much student debt do you have right now?

Nason: So, in my name personally, I have about $35,000 of Federal loans. But that does not count my family for the parent plus loans for which is part of how college was paid for.

Nikki Nolan: For these federal loans, do you know what your interest rate is?

Nason: So, my interest rate, it varies cause it’s all broken up into little, tiny chunks. But it varies from 1.9% all the way up to 6.9%. Like when I actually look at my paperwork and like, really see, it’s like two grand at 3.2% and then like ten grand at 6.9%. And it’s just so many little different like chunks on there.

Nikki Nolan: You’ve said this a little bit, but your household holds a lot of student debt. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Nason: Yeah, I would love to. So, I actually added up to what I think is a pretty close estimate the loans between me, my older sister, my mother, and my father. The reason why my mother and father had that debt is through parent plus loans. Just to be explicit, it’s not from their own college. This was the college to pay for me and my sister to go. And so estimated altogether, it’s about $520,000 between the four of us.

Nikki Nolan: Your family collectively holds over a half a million dollars in debt. My brain just exploded.

Nason: Mine too. Like I had originally said, a third about $35,000 in my name. My mom has about 160,000 to $170,000 parent-plus loans just for my education. And then my dad has around $60,000.

Nikki Nolan: I remember we were on this walk, at the beginning of the pandemic. And you said something that just like shook me right to my core about your mother didn’t even realize that she had taken out these parent plus loans.

Nason: That’s right. I mean, and I think that is kind of like a two-prong for that. I don’t want in any way to do my mom a disservice and say that she should have known. Cause when I first found out about this, I was like, “how did you not know mom?” and I think there’s a lot of reasons for that. But one of them being is that I was 17 years old when she signed that paperwork. And I don’t necessarily come from a family that when it comes to finances or financial literacy, that is not something that comes naturally. I grew up, my mom’s a single mom. Most of her jobs I watched her have growning up were under the table cash with the exception of one job.

She is somebody who wanted nothing more than for me to go to college and she was going to do whatever it was. But a lot of this paperwork was rushed. I think she knew that she was, she thought she was co-signing for me. I don’t think she had realized in the stack of paperwork about this big, our listeners can’t see, but it was like a stack, probably like a foot long that that was something that meant it was going to be in her name and that if it wasn’t paid back, it could garnish her social security in the future, or, do all kinds of horrible things to her finances. And I think we had talked about on our walk, that the way that we actually found out that she had this debt was about a year and a half after I had graduated college. Her newly married husband was waiting for his tax return. He’s a working-class guy. He worked for the city of Boston at the time. And he was the person that would landscape all of the public cemeteries in Boston. So, his salary was probably between $40,000/$50,000, just working-class blue-collar guy. When he got his tax returns, in the springtime, he was so dependent on those few thousand dollars that were coming in, that he would wait for that check to come in the mail. It didn’t come. And months passed, and it still didn’t come. And so, he called the IRS and figured out why. And it was because my mother hadn’t paid these massive loans and they defaulted and they garnished that $2,000 or $3,000 of tax returns that he was supposed to get. Luckily, he was able to do enough paperwork to get it back.

That’s how we found out about these loans. And it was a real shocker to my entire family system. Like it shook everything it really, really did. And I always say the IRS, like if they’re going to want money from you, you might not know it right away, but you eventually will somehow.

Nikki Nolan: It’s such a wild way to figure it out. I want to pull back just a tiny bit and, and go into, what sort of has been the impact of student debt on your life?

Nason: I mean, I always say that if I’m going to tell someone my student debt story, it’s going to have to be extremely personal and a radically vulnerable, which I’m totally willing to do. But just like I had shared about, this story with my mom’s husband’s taxes, like that’s personal, it’s personal, but it’s also something that I think needs to be talked about. As far as me personally, I think that the number one thing, aside from the amount of money that is hovering over my life, that I have to figure out how to pay back unless we get them canceled fingers crossed.

The number one thing is probably the mental health effects of it. In my family, I would describe myself as a person who really tries to take care of everybody. One of my goals and my life is to be able to financially take care of my mom one day.

And so, I think knowing that she has this debt and that I have this debt, there’s this emotional stress that honestly kind of just underlines and underscores every personal decision that I make. Whether it’s where I move, what job I get, what job I’ve left, which jobs I have to look for. Every decision is kind of impacted by that.

I would say number one thing is the stress that comes with it and the responsibility that it’s not even just responsibility, that’s almost an understatement. It’s dealing with the unfairness of it, and then also I’m always trying to figure out how I’m going to get out of it. And that takes a toll on somebody. I would say that’s the number one way it’s affected me. It’s not even necessarily the monthly payments. That is not fun. But mental part is a hundred percent.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah, I’ve heard from other people who are like, it was really the pivotal moment that broke my mental health.

Nason: I think one thing that I’ve thought about while trying to retain my optimism for the future of student debt and the possibility of cancellation is that I really do think that we have one powerful thing in our corner that sort of makes us unstoppable as student debt activists. And what I think that is, is that if you really look back at any time in American history, any success in social change, in huge movements winning, no matter how long or short that fight is- is that those coalitions of people are coalitions. Meaning that there are people from all backgrounds. It’s not just one insular group of people. And I think the one silver lining of student debt is that student debt has all of us in this country. I really don’t know that many people in my generation that don’t have it. Every kind of person, even a broad spectrum of wealth class. I mean, I know people that are upper-middle-class to almost wealthy that have student debt, that they have plenty of assets. They still have student debt. I know people that are super, core, working-class, and struggling and have student debt.

I know every gender, every race, every- everybody. I think that when you look at the success of social change in the past, it’s always because of that. So, we have that going for us. That’s an unstoppable force of nature. And I think that we really have to believe in the power of that. And that we all do come from so many different backgrounds.

We all have so many different skills. Whether we went to school to be a doctor, lawyer, an artist, whatever the heck that is, we all have something to offer to this movement. And I think the more people that believe that and can see the strength in that. I mean, there’s what I think the last time I checked 45 million, roughly student loan borrowers. 45 million of us. There’s only like 4,000 employees at the Department of Education. We already got one up on them as far as numbers goes. We really do have it all, and that can be looked at as something that also, really horrible and sad and so unfair. And it’s something that I think can work in our favor.

Nikki Nolan: I would love to learn more about your story. I want to know you. Tell me about you.

Nason: For sure. So I grew up in Boston, in the Boston area. I am a product of the Brookline Public School system, which I am really proud of. And I think owe a lot of gratitude to the resources that I was able to have there. I have been making films and you know, taking photographs and making documentaries since I was a kid.

And I’ve found a way to make a living off of it and do it professionally. So this is something that’s been with me since the beginning. So important to me, especially to find ways to use it, to uplift everything that we’re talking about too, and more. I want to start with, let me think.

I think one thing I really wanted to note on personally is that when I was in, it goes back to going to Brookline Public Schools and why I’m so grateful for it is when I was a freshman in high school, I almost dropped out of high school. I think I have always really learned differently. I learn much more in a visual way, in a much more creative way.

That was really apparent by the teachers around me, but I really started to resent a classic academic way of learning. And it started showing in my grades and I almost failed out. And there was this amazing program that I got to go into called OFC, which stands for “opportunity for change”.

And what this program did was you could be a sophomore, junior, or senior going into it, and they kind of restructured learning entirely. So you would kind of be removed from regular high school, but still within the same building. And instead of doing five classes a day, you would do one subject, let’s say history, for example, for two weeks at a time.

And then you would cycle to English for two weeks and then math for two weeks. And what that allowed for was to focus on one thing at a time. And in the morning, we would be able to do two electives, which one was a creative thing. And one was a physical outlet. So like whether it was a gym class or an exercise class, or we could do two artistic things.

So I would go to do, we had ceramics at my school. We had a photography at my school. We had filmmaking. So that’s where I really started to learn what I was good at creatively. So, I’m so thankful for that. And the other part of it is that their goal was to make sure not only that we graduated, but that we went to college and our dropout rate at our high school was like less than 2%. And all around us, in the Boston area, it could have been up to like 40%. Without that program I would have never graduated high school. And I don’t think I ever would have gone to college. So obviously that’s a complicated thing cause they really wanted us to go to college, but here I am. So I just think that moment growing up was such a turning point for good and some complexities to where I’m at now.

And I think the other thing I wanted to bring up about that too, is that in that program I was in, I would say I’m generally speaking, but I would say that most of the kids in this program were struggling financially at home. Came from families that were right above or under the poverty line, which is why they were having emotional issues in school.

They were kids that might’ve had dysfunctional family homes. So the emphasis on all of us going to college definitely came from the best place possible. But I think something that I think about now is that when we’re 17 years old, for the most part and applying for college, we’re about to make the first real adult decision in our entire lives.

And we’re asking kids to make the decision: do you want to go into debt as a 17-year-old, vulnerable human being that hasn’t had a lot of life experience yet? Do you want to go into debt to go to college or do you not want to? What a crazy thing that we make 17-year-olds choose. And I just think about myself in that moment and all the kids around me trying so hard to get out of the situations they were in at home and the decisions that we had to make.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah. And I feel it’s not even posed to people that way. It’s like, do you want a future? Or don’t you want a future? It’s not even posed do you want to accrue this level of debt? And even if it was posed, do you want to go into debt, you can invest in your education. It’s not like when you buy a house and they say, this is how much you’re going to owe, and this is when you’re going to pay it off. And this is how much interest. It’s so variable, especially because we have these income-based repayment plans, which goes into negative amortization, which is something that is like ridiculous. Which is why everyone gets so upside down on their loans is because they can’t, they don’t even make enough in the payment to even cover the interest.

And so, they don’t set us up when we’re young to think of any of these things. They’re like, do you want a future? Do you want your dreams? They don’t give us alternatives. Maybe they do now. But when we were going to school, it was like, go to college, go to college and you’ll figure it out how to pay.

Nason: Totally. And then not to mention, I went to a for-profit university that had open enrollment. Which I could because of my horrible grades my first couple of years of high school because I couldn’t focus. I was having emotional issues and dealing with trauma and trying to figure out who I was coming out as a queer person.

I mean, that’s so many things for a young person to go through and we all go through some version of that as we’re teenagers. But my options were to go to a for-profit university or not go at all because my for-profit university had open enrollment, meaning anybody could go. I didn’t have to have good grades.

Nikki Nolan: So, tell me about this for-profit school that you went to.

Nason: Sure. So I have so much to say about it. I think that I have good things to say about it, and I have a lot of criticisms of it. I will start first with, with this, this kind of goes into student loan debt is a race issue. It is a class issue in a lot of ways, it is a gender issue. And it is also a hundred percent a queer issue. And what makes it that way for me and something that I learned by going to the academy of art university was there were so many other queer kids around me. And no surprise. We love art school.

Nikki Nolan: Mmm hmm.

Nason: But I was far from being the only queer person that wanted to go to art school in San Francisco. I mean, give me a damn break.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah.

Nason: But what, this was not my story- I came from a family that is very, accepting of who I am, and I didn’t have that issue growing up really at all, to be honest with you. But that’s what kind of set me apart from the other queer kids that I was in school with, is that so many of them used going to the Academy of Art.

That was their one way out of their homophobic family. That was their family was not going to support their career in the arts. They were not going to support because they were gay or trans or anywhere under the LGBTQ umbrella. You could go to that school; you could live in San Francisco, be safer than if you were from somewhere in the middle or the south, or really wherever.

And so, I feel like the Academy of Art in so many ways was this safe haven for other queer kids that came from all over the place looking to have a way to live in San Francisco and be free. And that’s what makes student debt a queer issue is that all of them like me didn’t have one cent from their family for different reasons.

My family just didn’t have the money. Their families just wouldn’t support them, or maybe didn’t have the money to. I think that that is the story of so many other queer and trans people out there, why they’re in student debt. It wasn’t necessarily because of the education they might’ve really wanted to get.

It was also so they could get away, be safe, and be themselves. And so, I guess I can kind of lead that into the for-profit university and how it’s run. Should I do that?

Nikki Nolan: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I’ve actually never heard any, I’ve heard that it’s a race issue. I’ve heard that it’s a gender issue and I’ve seen statistics behind that, but you’re the first person that’s talked about it being a queer issue. And I feel like what you just said makes a lot of sense.

I’ve had a few people on the show who have gone to these for-profit schools and most of them predatory. Did you find any of that sort of predatory nature in the school?

Nason: Oh, God. Yeah. So, I’ll start with the way this school wasn’t on TV, I don’t believe. I think I remember being a teenager. I’d never been to San Francisco or California for that matter. I knew that I had to live in San Francisco. So that was number one. This was my feisty rebellious teenager self.

I’m going to San Francisco. I’m going to art school. And so I remember googling something like film school, San Francisco, and that was the first thing that came up. Boom. I applied, student loan paperwork was in the mail, and I was gonzo.

As far as predatory, one thing I would say about the Academy of Art is that when you have your first semester there, you don’t know that it’s going to take more than four years to get your degree. So, I would say that the way the school is structured is obviously for-profit. It’s absolutely a business, but it’s structured in a way where I didn’t know it was going to take me five-plus years to get a Bachelor of Arts when I first started. And most people don’t either. But when you get about halfway through school, through your degree and your college counselor says, okay, you have three more years to go.

You’re like, wait, I do? You’re not going to stop. You’re already halfway along, you’re not just going to, you’re not just going to stop. So that right there is predatory because you don’t necessarily know that going into it. And so the way they structure it is that you need a certain amount of credits just like any four-year university.

But if you want to get out in under five years, you have to do summer school. You have to take five classes instead of four a semester. And you have to do every little in-between semester. So they have these like rapid semesters that are during spring break. Have another one that’s in the middle of, I think it’s during Christmas holiday break, that month, where you can take two classes and zoom through it. But obviously, you’re paying for each course.

So it’s going to end up costing the same amount. No matter how you do it, you just have to decide how much work do I want to put myself through in one time to get this over with. And so I did take a year off of school in the middle of this, but it took me from 2009 until 2015 to get it done.

Nikki Nolan: Wow. Why does it take five years?

Nason: I would love to know. I think that one of the reasons why is that they know that many of the students there unless they’re international, are running their whole degrees off parent plus loans. And so you, I think it’s honestly, I mean, I’m saying this, like as if I know for sure, but from what I gather, I think trying to squeeze an extra year out of everybody. There’s no real reason if you ask that to your counselor, it’s like, “oh, well you need this many credits. If you want to get it done faster, do summer school, do this, do that.” But that’s not how any other college that I’ve ever heard of runs their program.

Nikki Nolan: I went to a state school, and I could have done it in four. I did it in five just because I changed my major three times. So that was on me. But also my school was like $5,000 a semester. Undergrad was absolutely affordable for me. And now people going to that school, I think it’s like $16,000 or $20,000. People who are fighting against student loan cancellation that went to school in the sixties, seventies, eighties, don’t have the same experiences as us. I think that rift- like Biden paid $1,500 for his law degree. $1,500. $1,000 is like one class. It’s like one class, if you’re lucky. Not even.

Nason: The way that it broke down at the Academy of Art was between room and board and then classes. So, I think with all of that together, which I did for the first couple of years, until I started working during school, was probably $32,000 a year, about $20,000 for classes and then $12,000 for room and board.

Nikki Nolan: That’s where they get you the room and board and the food. The subpar food that they’re just like, here’s a box of cereal. That would be $40.

Nason: Totally.

But now that you asked me this question about why it takes five years, I really want to investigate. It was a lack of information when I look back at it now. I think I just found my original email in 2009 with the financial aid advisor. And it was just so vague. And obviously, I didn’t know what to ask.

My parents weren’t helping me with the process of applying for college either. I was doing it on my own. My dad wasn’t in the picture at the time. And my mom, just for whatever reason was just not involved. So I was doing it with the people from that program in my high school that I was with. And it was really just me.

So obviously these are things that I maybe would know how to ask now. But that’s probably because I’m so well-versed in having student loan debt that I would know what to ask, but I certainly didn’t know back then. But I think throughout my time in the school, there were moments of feeling rushed to sign up. There were random fees that just made absolutely no sense. Like $500 bucks here, $200 bucks there. I know every college has that, but it was just over the top. Over the top.

Nikki Nolan: So you got through college, it took you some time, you took a break. What happened after college? Do you feel like all of that, that you invested into your degree actually financially paid off?

Nason: I would say that if anyone is going to consider going to the Academy of Art, one of the best things about that school is there some really amazing teachers and professors there that are also artists. That they are actually probably equally treated unfairly as the students, that’s a whole other thing. But there are some amazing teachers that I had there that I would not- that part was so worth it to me, the connections that I made. But the thing with that school is you can absolutely slip by and pass and not really get anything out of it. Or you can really apply yourself and take full advantage of the equipment that you have there, whatever medium that you’re learning. Mine was filmmaking.

So they had state-of-the-art everything. That part was worth it. But, after school, it really did feel like there were no resources that they gave as far as finding jobs. There were no resources, if you reached out. I remember reaching out after being like I’m feeling really lost. I don’t really know where to turn as far as finding work. Is there anything that you guys provide?

Nikki Nolan: Yeah.

Nason: And there was radio silence. Really just radio silence. And I think that they kind of do this thing where they really make you feel like you’re going to go out there and get a job and they’re going to help you. And they don’t. I have some resentments about that and feel ripped off in that regard because there were a lot of promises that just weren’t. No follow-through whatsoever.

And the thing personally that makes me really mad about the Academy of Art is that when I, the year that I was graduating school, I had been shortlisted in a very prestigious award ceremony at the Smithsonian Museum for a film that I made. And the school really tried to use that as a badge for themselves.

Not so much for me. And they still reach out every couple of years and ask if they can use that film to recruit students. And I always say no, because they don’t offer to pay me. They’ve never helped me do anything. I don’t attribute. I don’t mean this in an egotistical way whatsoever, but I do not attribute my success in getting that award, that festival, to that school. It was something that I really did a hundred percent on my own with my own equipment and had an amazing professor who helped me do it.

But it was not something that the school as an organization supported me and they didn’t, they weren’t behind me in making it. In fact, a lot of the staff there criticized that it was too out there. There’s a way that they really try and use their students to make more money. And I’ve just always said no to that.

Nikki Nolan: We’re getting close to the end. What advice would you give your younger self, knowing what you know now?

Nason: It’s so hard to think about what the right thing would be to say to my 17-year-old self, as I sign that paperwork. And my mom’s signed that paperwork and my dad and my sister and whoever. I mean, what I have told myself not to go? I don’t know because I definitely couldn’t have stayed where I was either.

I really knew I had to go. And I don’t regret the decision to leave and come to San Francisco. I think what I would tell myself is that what I was getting myself into was going to be more unfair and challenging than I could have understood. And to really get ready to fight back against the system that put me there. And to maybe use film school as my initiation, to using my camera, to try and affect change. That I was going to really have to do that. So if I was going to go to film school, really make sure that I learned how to do it well. I like to think that I have done that, but I would have emphasized that to myself. Like really, you’re going to have to use this tool to get things going.

Nikki Nolan: It’s been so lovely talking to you. If people want to find out about you, find any projects you’re working on, is there anything you want to promote?

Nason: Totally. So, some of my social media is private, but if people were to request me, I would totally open it up. I’m working on a lot of stuff behind the scenes right now to kind of launch in the new year. So hopefully by the time you hear this, it won’t be private, and you can see it all. But if you want to find me on Instagram or Twitter, my handle is @americanqueer.

I just started a film production company called Rainbow Cat Films. So, you can go to rainbowcatfilms.com to check out my work. I try and center most of my work around advocacy, activism, and uplifting, anything happening in different avenues of the social justice movement. That’s kind of my niche in filmmaking.

So if you check out my stuff then like it, give me a shout. I hope to be able to use my camera to work towards student debt cancellation and the activism around it. So if anyone has inquiries or ideas about that, please reach out to me because I’m so down to work and get this done.

Nikki Nolan: Thank you so much for being here. This was wonderful.

Nason: Thank you so much, Nikki. I know we took a while to do this and I’m so happy and I hope we can do it again soon.

 

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