Add Jim Simpson’s story to America’s heap of crippling student debt and tarnished hopes of a brighter future.
For truck drivers.
Simpson, 51, was working as a clerk in his wife’s office in Alabama to make ends meet and looking for a new career. Then his wife retired, slashing their household income. He was “dead broke,” he said, when he saw a trucking school ad in 2014:
No experience? No problem! Get paid to train.
CRST International, a transport and logistics company, was promising a career in an industry with steady work and a “huge sign-on bonus,” Simpson said. That November, he jumped on a bus to join an eight-month CRST work/training program in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the company's base. He lasted a month.
It was “brutal,” he said. “I don’t think they did background checks on some of these guys. They didn’t really prep you for the [commercial driver’s license] test. There was no real training in backing up. One guy got hypothermia. … I felt like after eight months with them I’d go running away screaming. They should call it Crash and Roll Stunt Team.”
Having broken his contract in order to join a competitor, Simpson estimates he still owes CRST $6,000 and said he regularly gets calls from collection agencies. “It did feel like indentured servitude,” he said. “There’s a lot the newbies aren’t told.”
Student loan debt continues to plague Americans. There’s more than $1.4 trillion of it outstanding, and the federal government pays debt collectors nearly 40 times what they bring in on collecting defaulted debt, according to Bloomberg. Advocates have argued for more generous debt forgiveness programs and more vocational options for those looking to train for new careers.
But blue-collar dreams can be a debt trap, too. Interviews with dozens of truck drivers, instructors, and industry experts yield a grim picture, in which the schools set up by trucking companies to prepare their next crop of drivers may leave students on the hook for thousands of dollars in training fees, with poor job prospects.
“There are some fly-by-night training programs out there,” said Harry Kowalchyk, president of the National Tractor Trailer School. For nearly 50 years, Kowalchyk’s Syracuse, N.Y., company has offered accredited truck driver training. People think “because they saw it online or advertised in a newspaper that they just need to go and will instantly make $500 a week,” he said, but “they’re not ready for the roads, they owe money, they’re disappointed.”