There are a handful of words that tend to come up at graduation ceremonies, words about pride and accomplishment, metaphors about chapters closing and doors opening. 

They were all there at SUNY Sullivan’s commencement this year, paraded out in speeches and penned in the cards pressed into graduates’ hands by family and friends. Watching two dear friends walk across the stage to accept their degrees, I felt my own heart fill up with a feeling Germans call freudenfreude, a sense of pure joy that comes from watching someone else succeed. It’s hard not to be joyful at a graduation ceremony. 

But there was another word that came up again and again as I wandered the Paul Gerry Fieldhouse chatting with the graduates. 

Debt. 

Not the kind of debt you pay off in a few years but the kind that follows you for decades. One after another, students told me some version of the same thing. They weren't just celebrating what they'd earned. They were calculating what they'd saved.

As of 2025, the Education Data Initiative estimates the average college student borrows more than $30,000 to complete a bachelor’s degree program, and 42 percent (nearly half) will take at least two decades to pay it all back.

This is true not just for students at private schools but those who attend public, state-owned institutions. Students who use federal loans to attend public institutions owe an average of $28,775, a number that doesn’t account for the private loans often necessary for students to pay tuition bills that have continued to skyrocket in recent years.

Already loaded down with utility bills, rent and car loans, adult students shared that they saw no room for college in the budget until they learned there was a tuition break available to adults in the county between the ages of 25 and 55. One woman quietly told me she’s already carrying a student debt load built up at past institutions. “But I had nothing to show for it,” she said, the drop in her voice telling me more about the stress and shame she’d been carrying for years than the words themselves. When she learned SUNY Sullivan would accept all the credits from those past institutions to put toward a degree and wouldn’t charge her anymore, the path forward was suddenly simple. “How could I not do it?” she said. “It was free.”

For high school students graduating from college more than a month before their high school graduation ceremonies, SUNY Sullivan was a door to a lighter future, one that may not be entirely debt-free, but one that will certainly be lighter. 

One teenager quickly calculated the amount she’d saved by graduating with an associate’s degree a month before her high school graduation, a number made all the more real by the student loan debt her father is still paying off little by little each month. Watching that teenager do the math in her head — her father's debt on one side, her own savings on the other — I understood exactly what she was calculating.

I was one of the lucky ones, thanks in no small part to the courses I took in high school at what was then called Sullivan County Community College. Those credits followed me to my bachelor's degree and helped shave down the cost of completing my education. Years later, my daughter is walking that same path. They’re headed toward a bachelor’s degree with their own credits from SUNY Sullivan helping lessen the financial impact. 

Put a number on what SUNY Sullivan saves any one student and it's significant. Put a number on what it saves a community over decades, across generations of students who left lighter than they arrived, and the math gets away from you fast.

You won’t see it in a graduation card, but the people carrying less of it know exactly what it's worth.