A woman has sold her frozen eggs to help pay off her crippling student debt after saying she didn’t have “any other option”.
Kassandra Jones, 28, from New York, US, has undergone five rounds of egg donation raising $50,000 towards her eye-watering $167,000 debt.
Despite working three jobs while studying for her bachelor’s degree and living at home with her parents to save on rent, Kassandra still found herself with $25,000 in debt.
When she was accepted for a master’s degree to realise her dream of becoming a registered dietician at New York University in 2017, she was looking at $40,000 for each academic year.
Determined to follow her career path, Kassandra applied for scholarships to no avail.
Suffering sleepless nights due to mounting debt and with her future on the line, when a friend suggested donating her eggs for money, she felt she had no choice but to contemplate it.
After researching further, as well as speaking to a friend who had made four months’ worth of wages in just a few weeks, Kassandra, then 23, took the plunge – receiving $10,000 for each round.
She’s now had five rounds in total but the payments have still failed to make a dent in her debt due to rising interest rates.
“Hearing that number out [of egg donations] loud every single time almost makes me catch my breath,” she told Jam Press.
“I didn’t really have any other option.
“I wish that wasn’t just for my tuition. I wish that money was for a downpayment for a house or to kickstart my own business.
“It [the debt] used to keep me up at night and felt like there was no light at the end of the tunnel.
“The projected repayments are $2,000 a month for the next minimum 10 years of my life.
“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.
“I heard about donating my eggs through word of mouth.
“Several female friends of mine had started doing it to help pay their cost of tuition and school expenses for things like books.
“I had one friend who decided she was all in to try it out and made thousands of dollars for essentially a month of her time.
“What would have taken me months to make at minimum wage jobs, she was able to do in 30 days. It was astounding, although terrifying.
“I felt more comfortable exploring it as an option for myself after seeing her successfully donate.”
Egg donation is when a woman gives her eggs to help families who cannot use their own.
However, it can be an “intensive” process, both physically and emotionally.
Kassandra said: “The whole process itself was labour intensive.
“I had to learn how to give myself injections.
“The very first time I was terrified and needed my friend to do it for me.
“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.
“And it’s worsened by eating or drinking too much.
“The best term to describe it is discomfort.
“I have also experienced cravings, sex drive changes, tender breasts, and dehydration.
“I didn’t have a problem with it as I knew this was genetic material I was donating and not my child.
“I knew I had to donate more than one or two times to get myself set up.
“After the third time it did start to have a longer time side-effect. I felt like my body wasn’t able to recover in the same way.”
Kassandra’s unconventional way of making ends meet has divided opinion – with older generations in particular taking issue with it.
She said: “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 empathise with the situation and are just as pissed 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 $22,00, which is still considered low for most students.
“So we are talking about a minimum 1,400% increase in costs where minimum wage only grew from $1.50 to $7.25, or 350%.
“To even have a chance to afford tuition without debt while in school, we would have to work 40-50 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.
“Bachelor’s degrees used to mean something before but now you can’t get hired for higher-paying jobs without a master’s degree.
“A lot of people who are over 40 are really dismissive and aggressive towards our generation.
“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.”
Kassandra’s last donation was in February 2021 and she has set aside the money until US student loan repayments – which have been paused since March 2020 – restart in August this year.
In 2021, the US had a record-breaking $1.73 trillion in student debt.
