A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 9
Today’s story idea is certainly topical and likely on the minds of many young people: “Student Debt”:
$527 billion.
That’s how much money Americans owe in student loan debt.
Last school year alone, U.S. students took out about $95 billion in loans.
And, according to the latest figures, college students are, on average, saddled with a record $23,200 in debt upon graduation.
As students and recent graduates confront the toughest job market in a generation, the squeeze to repay their school loans has incited countless conflicts with lenders and debt collectors.
You graduate from college. Or grad school. You’ve accumulated tens of thousands of dollars worth of loan debt [there was a story on Huff Post about a student who owed over $200K].
What would you be willing to do to pay off your debt?
And if push came to shove, where the institution to whom you owe money, wants repayment now, how far would you go to get yourself out of the hole?
This movie could be a comedy. Or something much darker. How about playing around with the idea of a Protag who is at heart an academic, living for years in the safe, hallowed halls of universities. But the debt is very real. And the consequences for failing to repay the debt can be made even more real — original loans repackaged and sold to a shady financial outfit with underworld ‘enforcement’ connections?
Is this an innocence to negative experience story, fall from grace? Or a story of self-discovery, where the Protagonist learns that underneath all their theory and education lies the heart of a killer?
When my oldest son started at Tufts and NEC two years ago, it was the largest class of freshmen entering college in the history of the U.S. — over 3 million students. If you take the number of college grads from the last 5–10 years, and current college students, that’s a huge target demo. This story could be something that taps into some of this group’s pretty primal fears:
How am I going to survive financially once I graduate? How am I going to pay off all this debt?
Given all that, where would you take this story conceit?
