The ease with which students can get loans can cause them to graduate with more debt than they should. (Elliot Torres/Borderzine.com)

As new college graduates go job hunting, the bill collector comes calling

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EL PASO – Graduation is an accomplishment every college student looks forward to, a reward for years of hard work, but for some students what should be the beginning of a successful life can be the start of a nightmare – paying back thousands of dollars in student loans. “I would use half of my student loan to help me survive the next six months of school, until I got the next loan,” said Salvador Jauregui, a 2010 graduate from the University of Texas at El Paso. He, like many others across the nation, worked while attending school and relied on student loans to help cover expenses. After gradation Jauregui had difficulty finding a good paying job, and eventually defaulted on his loans. Student loan debt is no small issue.

Students look at graduate school as a way to get a full-time job. (Erika Lopez/Borderzine.com)

It seems harder today to make a college degree pay off

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EL PASO – Josie Jimarez Howard imagined herself surrounded by artifacts from fascinating distant epochs as she pursued her passion for history tending to treasures in a museum after earning a degree in history from Reed College. But instead, she found herself selling modern cosmetics at Macy’s. She soon realized that the only way to get the job she wanted related to her studies was to go back to school for a graduate degree. “I think a lot of jobs teaching in the museum require a higher degree than a B.A. I looked for jobs at museums but during the Bush administration there weren’t as many.”

Howard, who had graduated in 2007, enrolled in graduate school at the University of Texas at El Paso in 2011 and is currently a teaching assistant for a freshman history class. “Honestly, it’s been hard.