My Student Loan: The Movie

Mike Johnston addresses the audience at the Hot Docs Festival. Perhaps if his student loan didn’t get in the way, he could afford publicity shots.

Whenever I contemplate the woes that I faced with my student loan experience — such as with my previous blog entry, The Student Loan Racket: The Failure of Canada’s Post-Secondary Educational Funding — I always fondly look back on Peterborough filmmaker (and Trent grad), Mike Johnston’s wonderful film, “My Student Loan.”

From the Hot Docs Festival Library:

“After graduating from Trent University, Mike Johnson found himself unemployed, crushed by his student loan and plagued by collection agencies. He decided to make a film about his student loan to pay it off. Begging and borrowing cameras, Johnston launched on a hilarious and horrifying ride through debt-ridden student life. Students working at the local pizzeria tally up their combined debt on the cash register a total of $90,000 in one stop. In fact, Trent students have run up a combined debt of $54 million in the last four years, at interest rates of 12 per cent and up! But the absurdity doesn’t stop there. The university itself is wallowing deeper in debt as a strategy to get out of debt. With dogged determination and acidic deadpan irony, Johntson follows the money and takes politicians to task to expose the dangerous lunacy of the new economics of education. Funny, insightful, essential viewing.”

You can watch the full film online at the Hot Docs Festival Library.  Just click on the link.