A young woman is selling off her frozen eggs in order to pay off her college tuition fees, making $50,000 in the process.
28-year-old Kassandra Jones worked three jobs during her degree and even managed to live rent-free at her parents’ house while studying, but still had to pay off a huge $167,000 student debt.
After four years of studying she was still short of $25,000, and her Masters in Public Health at New York University was set to stick on $40,000 per year.
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So, she underwent four rounds of egg donation in an attempt to generate the cash she needs to continue studying.
Jones claims she was left with ‘really no other options’ after finding herself with just a month to come up with a plan.
She told the New York Post: “I saw it as one of the only ways to be able to have any kind of money at all,
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“I’ve done everything I possibly could including donate my eggs, and powered through and found resiliency to keep going and try to achieve, and have achieved, what society has always told me I needed to do to be successful.”
She embarked down this particular road when a friend suggested it, claiming to have made four months of wages in a week.
At 23-years-old, Kassandra decided to take a chance on it.
She did the first round in California and made $8,000, before donating more at the NYU Langone Fertility Center for $10,000 each time.
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Jones explained: “The projected repayments [for the school loans] are $2,000 a month for the next minimum 10 years of my life. Hearing that number out loud every single time almost makes me catch my breath.
“When you’re desperate to figure things out as a young adult, and you have this crushing amount of debt from the education system, it puts you between a rock and a hard place.”
The process is ‘labour intensive’ and requires Jones to give herself hormone injections.
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It’s not without risk, either. Some studies show an increased breast cancer risk in younger donors going through the ovarian stimulation injections.
Furthermore, she once awoke to ‘pretty excruciating pain’. She said: “I actually showed up to orientation for NYU on painkillers two days after I donated.
“Even though they say that you can go back to normal activity – not strenuous but normal activity – within a day or so, I don’t believe that.
“There was a ton of pressure and swelling in my lower abdomen, pain from cramping that made it difficult to walk, stand up, sit down or laugh."
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She continued: “I struggle with sleep now, digestive issues, weight loss [and] gain, mood. Just things that weren’t very obvious before I started doing this now I feel like have become a bit of a problem.”
Still, she continues because of the debt.
Jones explained: “The biggest misconception about debt is that we made this decision, and so we should somehow live with it, but what choices were we really offered to secure our futures?
“People my age get it. They completely empathize with the situation and are just as p***ed at how our education system and government has failed us.
“Older generations have no idea what this feels like with the new circumstances we have to endure.
“In the ’70s and ’80s, tuition and fees plus room and board at a four-year college were $1,400. Now it’s an average of $22,000, which is still considered low for most students."
Jones added: “To even have a chance to afford tuition without debt while in school, we would have to work 40 to 50 hours a week with whatever wages you can get without a degree and then somehow pull off being a full-time student and find the time to, I guess, sleep?
“Generations who also currently hold top-tier positions now and worked their way up don’t have the same qualifying entry points either.
“We actually are working even harder than they did with very little to no reward to speak for it, and I think that is why our adaptations and priorities have shifted as a result,” she concluded.
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Tom Wood