A new show is looking to put a dent in the student debt crisis — “Jackass” style.
The show, called “Total Forgiveness,” premiered Wednesday on Dropout, a subscription service recently launched by comedy website CollegeHumor. In it, Grant O’Brien and Ally Beardsley, two CollegeHumor personalities, dare each other to complete increasingly challenging tasks — interviewing a student-loan expert while leeches roam your body or laying in a coffin for an extended period — in exchange for money from their employer to help pay off their student loans.
The premise of the show is to use extreme stunts to help speed up that process of repaying student debt. For each task O’Brien and Beardsley successfully complete, they receive a certain amount of money towards their loans. The sum starts at $500 and increases, ultimately hitting $10,000 in the final episode.
‘Total Forgiveness’ is just the latest sign that the ubiquity of student debt has pushed it into the cultural zeitgeist.
The level of challenge goes up with the prize amount. The stunts range from physical (eating extremely spicy food while Skyping with an ex) to just plain embarrassing (a public reading of middle-school diaries).
“The idea is student loans are such a nightmare, the next 20 years for us are just kind of shitty every month — barely scraping by,” Beardsley, 30, explains while pitching the show with O’Brien, 32, to their boss in a scene in the first episode. So their aim is to squeeze all of that hardship into four months, the length of the web series.
“Total Forgiveness” is just the latest sign that the ubiquity of student debt has pushed it into the cultural zeitgeist. Beer company Natural (better known as Natty) Light advertised an offer of student-loan help during the Super Bowl for the second year in a row. TruTV recently ordered more episodes of “Paid Off,” a comedy game show where student debt payoff is the grand prize. Challenges paying off student debt also provided a major plot device for Jonathan Franzen’s most recent novel, “Purity.”
O’Brien and Beardsley are perhaps not the most sympathetic characters to illustrate the challenges of the nation’s $1.5 trillion student-loan problem. They readily admit they weren’t preyed upon in taking on their loans, as is the case for many borrowers facing the most dire consequences of student debt.
In addition, they’re white, unfortunately, an advantage in the student-loan repayment system — black borrowers borrow more to attend college and struggle more to pay it back. They’re also paying down $55,109.01 (Beardsley) and $95,441.73 (O’Brien), much higher than average for their bachelor’s degrees. Finally, they’re working in entertainment.
Nonetheless, the show provides a window into a student-loan experience that’s likely relatable for many of the nation’s 44 million student-loan borrowers.
Student-loan debt has become a formidable challenge
A combination of stagnant wage growth, high cost of living — particularly in areas with opportunities for college graduates — and the rising cost of college has made student debt a formidable challenge for young adults trying to get ahead financially. Though borrowers with $50,000 or more in debt, like O’Brien and Beardsley are still a relatively rarity, they’re more common than they were two decades ago.
What’s more, beginning in the 2010s, these borrowers on average owe more than their initial repayment balance in the first five years of repayment.
Beardsley described this feeling of barely making a dent in their student loan as ‘sisyphean,’ a reference to the Greek myth of Sisyphus, who was sentenced to push a boulder up a hill only to watch it roll back down again.
In an interview, Beardsley, who identifies as non-binary and prefers gender-neutral pronouns, described this feeling of barely making a dent in their student loan as “sisyphean,” a reference to the Greek myth of Sisyphus, who was sentenced to push a boulder up a hill only to watch it roll back down again. Or, as O’Brien put it, tackling student debt along with his other financial obligations evokes “that feeling of I’m working so hard and getting nowhere.”
“We wanted to make ‘Jackass,’ we thought that was really funny,” Beardsley said in the interview, referring to early 2000s daredevil crazy stunt show. But the show also provides a window into the nitty-gritty of paying off student loans. In addition to his full-time job at College Humor, O’Brien waits tables. The first episode of “Total Forgiveness” features Beardsley’s $500 car that’s leaking oil.
In fact, as O’Brien tells it, part of the reason they wanted to do a student debt show is because paying off their loans is so central to their reality. “It’s truly the defining feature,” O’Brien said of his debt. “That, and I’m gay — pretty much those are the two things to know about me.”
Though O’Brien said that the show started off “as a scam that Ally and I were running on the company,” by convincing their employer to help them pay off their student loans, the two hope its impact is broader. In some ways, the show portrays an extreme version of a student-loan fix already being employed by the private sector in the absence of major public policy solutions.
Companies are offering to help workers pay student debt
Employers are increasingly offering to help pay their workers’ student loans as a perk. One insurance company recently announced it would allow its workers to trade in extra unused vacation days for money to put towards their student loans.
As entertainers, O’Brien and Beardsley’s top priority is for “Total Forgiveness” to be entertaining, but ideally the show will also raise some awareness surrounding our nation’s student-loan problem and, perhaps, inspire some policy change, they said.
Ideally, the show will also raise some awareness surrounding our nation’s student-loan problem and, perhaps, inspire some policy change.
“None of my ‘debt friends’ can afford anything,” O’Brien said, referring to friends of his who also have student loans. “None of us have homeownership in our near future, which feels unsustainable.” Research indicates the challenges of affording a home with student debt go beyond O’Brien’s friend group.
Both in the show and in our interview, O’Brien and Beardsley acknowledged the role that some of their personal choices — the colleges and careers they picked — play in their plight. But they say that through the experience of researching the Total Forgiveness, they also began to understand the broader context of those choices.
At one point, Jay Fleischman, a student-loan lawyer, asks O’Brien (while leeches roam his body as part of a challenge), “You were sold the dream, weren’t you?” Fleischman goes on to say later that once O’Brien completed his education he found himself in a situation where “you’re coming out of the gate and you’re feeling you screwed up before you started.”
O’Brien agrees that’s how he feels. Nonetheless, he’s not sure he’d do things differently if given the opportunity to choose his path again. As a teenager living in Ohio, O’Brien said he imagined the future he wanted — as an actor somewhere else — and saw taking on student debt as the way to get it.
“All I know at that time was there was a life that I wanted and there was a way to get it and so I did it,” O’Brien said when we spoke. “Is that a societal problem? Is that a ‘me’ problem? Is that a myth of college being the only way to get these things? Yes, to all of those.”
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