Imagine you’re in your late teens and you’ve just graduated from high school. You’ve done all the hard work over the past couple of years to apply to college and, finally, you’re going to be headed off to the school of your dreams. Four years of college will prepare you for the real world, or so the saying goes.
So you head off to start your collegiate career, and over the next four years everything works out perfectly. You graduate and now you’re ready to enter the workforce with a college degree. All of those years of hard work and expensive college costs will finally pay off — again, so the saying goes.
But as it turns out, you are greeted by a tumultuous job market with few openings in the sectors you have been tailored for. As the months and years pass, your college payments kick in and the low-paying job you managed to find doesn’t really help you cover all of your financial commitments. Eventually you hit the financial brick wall and you know you have to file for bankruptcy.
Sadly, this hypothetical situation is all too real for many people out there. So what can they do about it? Do they have any options to clear out their massive student debt?
Until the laws change, the answer, unfortunately, is no. There is virtually no way for student debt to be discharged through bankruptcy, regardless of what type of bankruptcy you choose, unless you have extreme circumstances to support such a discharge.
Source: New Haven Register, “EDITORIAL: Student loan debt should not be exempt in bankruptcies,” July 11, 2014