Eventually, he just couldn’t take it anymore. The rejection, the depression, the mounting bills, it became too much to deal with all on his own, Chad Albright said.

“I had to escape this debtors’ prison,” he said — it felt like there was no other choice. “That’s what America became to me, a prison. So I left.”

Albright bought a one-way ticket to China and boarded an airplane, uncertain if he would ever return to the country he once considered home.

It was 2011, and Albright was 30 years old, starting over in a country more than 7,000 miles away from his life in Pennsylvania — away from his family, his friends, and far away from the $30,000 he owed in student loans.

Borrowing money for college seemed like a sound financial decision at the time. Albright thought his degree would reliably lead the way to a well-paying career.

With tuition comes high debt. And when delivering pizzas was the only job he could find two years post-graduation — with the country’s outstanding student debt rising above $1 trillion, and one million people defaulting on student loans every year — it didn’t seem like it was worth it after all.

“I was expected to make a $400 loan payment every month, but I had no money, no sustainable income,” Albright said during a Skype interview. “College ruined my life.”

In high school, he read books about the American dream, classics like “The Great Gatsby” and “The Grapes of Wrath.” If he worked hard, it would pay off — that’s what he was always told.

But, Albright said, he now knows those were just stories.

“There was no future for me in the United States,” Albright said. “And the American dream? Yeah, it doesn’t exist.”

And few places have higher student debt than Pennsylvania. Average debt per student in the commonwealth is $36,854, one of the highest in the country, compared to the national average of $28,650.

To get educated, most students go into debt. About two in three students who graduated in 2017 had student loan debt.

How did he get here?

Growing up, it was drilled into Albright’s head that college would lead to success.

His father worked for the railroad, and his mother was a beautician. They never attended college but believed if their son went he would have ample opportunities at his fingertips.

Albright started delivering pizzas right after high school to save money for his college tuition and continued to work full time even after starting classes. He was 25 years old when he finally thought he earned enough money to enroll at Millersville University.

It wasn’t easy being the oldest student in his classes, Albright said. His classmates ostracized him and it was difficult balancing his course load and a full-time job.

“I wanted that diploma, and I was willing to work for it,” Albright said. “Everyone always told me it would be worth it.”

So as costs began to add up — tuition, textbooks, rent — Albright felt justified in his decision to take out student loans.

But to his dismay, finding a job after graduation wouldn’t be so easy. His degree in public relations wasn’t opening up as many doors as he anticipated. 

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Albright graduated in December 2007— right at the start of the economic crisis that would later become known as the Great Recession, the longest period of economic decline since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Millions of people lost their life savings, their jobs and their homes. Not exactly an ideal time to be entering the job market, Albright said.

Interview after interview, Albright heard the same thing: “Sorry, there’s someone who’s been doing this for 10 years and just lost their job. I have to go with someone who has 10 years’ experience.”

“But the last thing they would say to me,” Albright recalls, “‘Don’t worry, your day will come.’” 

Back to the pizza shop and back to living with his parents in Lancaster, Albright fell into a deep depression. He was behind on his student loans and still couldn’t find a job. Plus, he was worried that once he did find a job, the government would garnish his wages.

“Two years of nonstop interviews and nothing,” Albright said. “I was so done.”

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‘My life was so much better once I left. Why would I ever go back?’

After being on the job hunt for two years, Albright finally saw a glimmer of hope. While he was at the gym, he saw a woman on CNN talking about her job teaching English to children in Hong Kong.

“She said, ‘I have no desire to return back home,’” Albright recalled. “That’s when I started looking into teaching overseas.”

He told his parents about his idea, and to his surprise, they supported the decision. They saw how much their son had been struggling, and they wanted to see him happy, said his mother, Leslie Mullin.

“As a parent, you just want your child to be happy,” Mullin said. “So even though I was worried about him being so far away, I wasn’t going to stand in his way.”

Albright arrived in China in 2011 and began teaching English in the city of Zhongshan. He loved working with children and developed a knack for teaching, he said.

And for the first time, he felt like he was doing something meaningful with his life.

He was only earning about $1,000 a month in China — not a large amount by most standards, Albright said — but his rent was covered through his job. And since the cost of living in China is so much less than in Pennsylvania, Albright was able to enjoy his income.

He went out to eat with friends, traveled to other cities: “Things I never got the chance to do in America because of my student debt,” Albright said. “My life was so much better once I left. Why would I ever go back?”

Albright did eventually go back to the United States, but just to visit his mother. And after teaching in China for a few years, he moved to Ukraine, where he now is a permanent resident, working in sales. He hasn’t checked his student loan account in nearly eight years, either.

“I hardly ever think about it,” he said.