The College Trap: Why Your “Dream School” Is the One You Can Afford
Originally published on Medium on Jun 27, 2026. At just 16 years old, I have already paid off $2,700 in debt and built a net worth of over $2,000. While most teens my age are daydreaming about high school proms and signing away their futures for a four-year university vacation, I’m choosing a different path. The traditional college system is broken. It is a debt-fueled trap pushing a false narrative that you must go deep into debt for a fancy degree to succeed. To understand how we got into this $1.7 trillion mess, you have to look at the history of the corporation that built the trap: Sallie Mae. 1. The History of Sallie Mae: From Bureaucracy to Big Business The student loan crisis didn’t happen by accident; it was engineered by the federal government. In 1972, the Nixon administration created the Student Loan Marketing Association, nicknamed Sallie Mae, as a Government-Sponsored Enterprise (GSE). Originally, it wasn’t a direct lender. Its purpose was to use U.S. Treasury money ...
