I’m carrying about eighteen grand in student loans. By the time I finish my bachelor’s, that number will likely double. Thirty-five thousand dollars may not sound like much compared to the horror stories you hear, six-figure balances, interest eating people alive, but let’s be real: when you’re working full-time, rebuilding your knees, and staring down the last third of your life, thirty-five grand feels like a mortgage without the house. It’s not a number, it’s a weight.

 

And that weight isn’t going anywhere. I chose the accelerated online program to keep the debt as lean as possible. I’m grinding through it with a high GPA, doing what I’m supposed to do. But here’s the reality: I’m almost sixty. I don’t have the luxury of time to “wait and see” if the system eventually works itself out. I’ve got maybe forty years left on this planet, and I refuse to spend them irrelevant and broke.

 

That’s the part the politicians never grasp. They talk about “fixing education,” but they’re never the ones sitting through recorded lectures at two in the morning because you had to work late. They don’t feel the disconnect of watching a screen instead of debating face-to-face with classmates. They don’t understand what it means to have your body failing, your job demanding, and your classes stacked all at once. They make policy from 30,000 feet while people like me live it on the ground.

 

I’m not asking for free education. I don’t believe in that. Nothing worth having is free. But what I do believe is this: our education system has been bloated, padded, and warped into something that makes students pay for bureaucracy instead of knowledge. Too much red tape. Too many administrators. Too many slogans dressed up as progress while students carry the debt and the sleepless nights.

 

Here’s why I’m still in it: relevance. I will not go quietly into the last act of my life. I’ve done the maintenance jobs. I’ve scraped, clawed, and rebuilt myself more than once. But Social Security isn’t going to cover survival. And I’m not going to live the next forty years barely eating, barely surviving, waiting on a government check. That’s not living, that’s dying on a payment plan.

 

So I study. I write. I chase this degree because it keeps me sharp, keeps me learning, keeps me in the fight. And I know I’m not the only one. There are thousands of men and women my age dragging themselves back into the classroom, digital or otherwise, because they refuse to become disposable.

 

Student loans, broken classrooms, political noise—all of it is real. But here’s the deeper truth: relevance is earned. You either keep fighting, or you fade out. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to fade out.