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This story is part of the New Boom series on millennials in America.

If Noelle Johnson had a bachelor's degree, she'd be able to live closer to work, she says. She wouldn't have to spend so much of her free time hustling for baby-sitting gigs. She'd shop at the farmers market. She'd be able to treat her sister to dinner for once. She and her husband could go on trips together — they'd be able to afford two tickets instead of one.

There are dozens of ways that not having a college degree and dealing with student loans affects Johnson's life.

Johnson, 27, lives in Manassas, Va., and commutes 90 minutes each way by bus and train to Arlington, Va. She likes her job as an office manager at a nonprofit and makes around $40,000 a year. That compares with a national median income of about $34,000 for households led by young adults with some college. The capital region has a higher cost of living as well.

But households led by young college graduates have a median income of about $58,000. And after nine years of changing schools, trying to choose a major, dealing with an illness and managing tuition costs, Johnson has about $20,000 in student loan debt and no degree to show for it.

Millions of millennials are in the same boat. More than 40 percent of households headed by young adults with some college are dealing with student loans. And without the increased earnings that usually come with a college degree, managing even just a few thousand dollars in loans can be a huge challenge.

Richard Fry, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center, says the real impact of student loans for those with no degree isn't even on how much money they make — it's on their overall wealth.

"The 'some college educated' household that doesn't have the student debt? Their net worth is about $10,000, $11,000," he says. "As opposed to that, for the ones that are still sort of servicing their student debt? They have a net worth of about a grand. So you're looking at about a tenfold difference."

Fry says households with student loans are also more likely to have other kinds of debt, like credit card debt and car payments.

That's true of Johnson and her husband. "We've done payday loans, and, you know it just — it gets out of control," she says. The couple also dipped into their rainy day fund. "We had so much more in savings, but we had to put a lot of that toward school."

That's savings, earnings and debt, all going toward tuition — which is higher than ever, and still rising.

That means lots of students like Johnson have to make calculations: Draw school out so there's time to save up — putting yourself at risk for dropping out altogether? Or take on more student loan debt?

When Johnson hit the $20,000 mark, she realized she needed to step back.

"I had to say, 'Well, I can't take out any more loans and I definitely don't have the cash for it.' So I have to stop, and then save, and then pay for that semester, and then do that all over again," she says.

i i

Johnson decided against taking out more money when her student loan debt reached $20,000. "So I have to stop, and then save, and then pay for that semester, and then do that all over again," she says. James Clark/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption James Clark/NPR

Johnson decided against taking out more money when her student loan debt reached $20,000. "So I have to stop, and then save, and then pay for that semester, and then do that all over again," she says.

James Clark/NPR

She's still at it, and she has a plan to get to graduation. Her job has a tuition reimbursement program, she says, "but that means I do need to be able to pay first, so we're just working on getting some money together so I can pay for my next semester, and then it'll be reimbursed."

She has about 1 1/2 years to go to finish her bachelor's in nonprofit management at Liberty University. "I think I'll be able to knock it all out pretty easily," Johnson says.

Fry of Pew says it's a good idea for students not to drag out attaining a degree for too long. "Most people who are going to finish bachelor's degrees, they've got 'em by age 30."

Ultimately, though, how long it takes you to finish matters less than whether you do.

"For a bachelor's degree, you're looking at at least an extra $600,000, $800,000 over a working life, compared to if you'd stopped your education at high school," Fry says. "College is expensive, but it's a good investment."

Johnson has no illusions that finishing her degree is going to make her rich or solve all her problems. "I don't expect, because I have a B.A., I'm going to make an exorbitant amount of money."

But she does think it will relieve some of the paycheck-to-paycheck pressure she and her husband feel every month. They'll be able to build their nest egg back up and think about having kids.

"I really want it to work. We really want to be able to be successful," she says. "I know that having my degree is definitely going make the difference. ... It's going to do everything for us."

Correction Nov. 21, 2014

In the audio of this story, as in a previous Web version, we incorrectly say that Noelle Johnson makes about $10,000 more than the national average for people with some college education and that young college graduates make an average $58,000 a year. The story should have said that the median income for households led by young adults with some college education is about $34,000. And it should have said households led by young college graduates have a median income of about $58,000.

Millennials

student loans

paying for college

college loans

debt

college tuition

Samuel Gbazeki is fed up.

"How can we cope?" he asks.

The university professor, who teaches freshmen and sophomore English, has been out of work since July when Liberia's government suspended schools because of the Ebola outbreak.

"Ebola is very, very dangerous because it kills and has no boundaries," he says. "But people don't know what to do. They go to bed hungry because jobs have stopped."

The trim man is wearing a tan baseball cap, pressed khaki shorts and a spotless white T-shirt. He will admit to being "something over 60 years old."

Gbazeki says Ebola has hit at a particularly bad time for Liberians. It's one of the world's 10 poorest countries. But things had started to look up. A little more than a decade after a brutal civil war had brought the impoverished nation to its knees, authorities say Liberia was beginning to stabilize. The gross national income, for example, has been on a slow but steady upward trend.

Then came the outbreak. Unemployment has soared. Today, Liberia has become a nation of peddlers.

Gbazeki is standing among a small crowd in front of the Daily Talk news board. The board, which stands 10 feet high and 15 feet wide on busy Tubman Boulevard in downtown Monrovia, is an innovative and low-tech approach to sharing news in a nation where many don't own a television or a radio and can't afford a newspaper.

The board is the brainchild of Alfred Sirleaf, a journalist who created it in 2000, three years before the war ended. He updates the blackboard by hand several times a week, writing headlines in white chalk. A river of people flows past including pedestrians, laborers and multiple vendors of food, clothes, clocks, eyeglasses, kola nuts, shoes. Many stop to look at the day's news.

The headlines on Dec. 2 include: "AFTER KILLING NEARLY 6,000 PEOPLE IN AFRICA, DEATH RATE DROP WITH EBOLA ON THE RUN; DUE TO KILLER EBOLA FEAR SUPREME COURT HALTS ELECTIONS, ORDERS CANDIDATES TO STOP ACTIVITIES; CRIMINALS ENTER PRES SIRLEAF'S COMPOUND FROM BEACH SIDE STEAL WINDOW GLASSES.

Gbazeki is stunned by this last bulletin.

"This is very astonishing," he says. "Because a president is supposed to have maximum security. If criminals can do this, it's very astonishing"

Gbazeki says he is not a daily visitor but has been stopping by the board recently for updates on elections due to be held Dec. 16. Liberia's Supreme Court is reviewing a petition that the elections be postponed due to Ebola. But President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf's government wants them to go ahead, even though it has banned mass gatherings.

Gbazeki reflects the opinion of many standing around him when he says he doesn't understand the logic.

"According to our president, because of Ebola we should not assemble," he says. "Now they are saying elections should be held."

Gbazeki says life was hard before Ebola.

Now?

"If Ebola closes everything, where do people get money to feed their family?," he asks. "People can hardly put food on the on table for their family. We are hurt."

ebola

Liberia

In Southeast Asia, the battle against malaria is growing even more complicated. And it's all because of monkeys, who carry a form of malaria that until a few years ago wasn't a problem for people.

"According to the textbooks there are only four species of plasmodium parasites that cause malaria in humans," says Balbir Singh, the director of the Malaria Research Center at the University of Malaysia in Sarawak. Now a fifth malaria parasite, called plasmodium knowlesi, has become the leading cause of malaria hospitalizations in Malaysian Borneo.

"At some hospitals in Malaysian Borneo," Singh says, "Up to 95 percent, even 100 percent of the cases are actually this monkey malaria."

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The knowlesi parasite used to be found only in monkeys. But as farmers have cleared more land for palm oil plantations and new hydroelectric dams are built, the area's long-tailed macaques are being squeezed out of their original habitats. So the monkeys end up living closer to people. And the mosquitoes that transmit the parasite are now biting and infecting humans.

It's a tough malaria to deal with. The mosquito that carries monkey malaria, Anopheles leucosphyrus, feeds mainly at night and outdoors. So the traditional anti-malaria campaigns, which hand out bed nets and spray homes with insecticides, won't help.

What's more, lab technicians in Malaysia often misidentify this new parasite as the more benign plasmodium malarie. The milder form can be treated with pills; monkey malaria often requires hospitalization and a regimen of intravenous drugs. That's because of its aggressive nature. The knowlesi parasite reproduces every 24 hours in the patient's blood while the milder plasmodium malarie takes 3 days to replicate. So monkey malaria comes on fast and can quickly make a person terribly sick. It also has the potential to kill, as do some other strains of malaria. But plasmodium malarie does not.

The fact that the plasmodium knowlesi parasite resides in monkeys also makes it difficult to stop the spread of the disease. In the other forms of malaria, wiping out the parasite in humans can bring transmission in an area to a halt.

With monkey malaria this isn't possible because of the large number of long-tailed macaques in the Malaysian jungle. Singh notes that they're a protected species so any temptation to attack the disease by reducing the monkey population probably isn't feasible.

Singh predicts that the number of cases of monkey malaria will only go up as human development pushes further into the habitat of the long-tailed macaque. The parasite doesn't make the macaques sick, so the parasite and the monkeys get along peacefully. The problems arise when the people are linked to the monkey malaria chain.

Malaysia

monkeys

Malaria

Nazila Fathi covered turbulent events in her native Iran for years as The New York Times correspondent. She learned to navigate the complicated system that tolerates reporting on many topics, but can also toss reporters in jail if they step across a line never explicitly defined by the country's Islamic authorities.

Fathi recalls one editor telling her what journalists could do in Iran: "We have the freedom to say whatever we want to say, but we don't know what happens afterwards."

Five years ago, Fathi was covering the aftermath of Iran's hotly contested 2009 presidential election, when demonstrators flooded the streets to protest a vote they said was rigged in favor of the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The government warned journalists to stop covering the street demonstrations, which often turned violent, yet Fathi continued to file stories for the Times.

But one day, a government source told her that the authorities had given her photo to snipers who were believed to be shooting the protesters. Soon after, intelligence officials appeared on the street outside her apartment.

Fearing arrest, she remained in her apartment until she and her husband, along with their two small children, left for the Tehran airport in the middle of the night and took a flight out of the country.

Fathi has not gone back to Iran and now lives in suburban Washington, D.C. She's written about the challenges of reporting in Iran in a new book, The Lonely War: One Woman's Account Of The Struggle For Modern Iran.

Speaking with NPR's Steve Inskeep, Fathi says she believes that some journalists are arrested not for their reporting, but to serve as a pawn in a complex power struggle. It could involve Iran and a foreign country or it could be an internal feud between two Iranian government agencies, she says.

The Lonely War

One Woman's Account of the Struggle for Modern Iran

by Nazila Fathi

Hardcover, 297 pages | purchase

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Here are the highlights of the interview:

Was the government monitoring you because you were a journalist?

Yes, from the beginning. There was a guy, who I call Mr. X in the book, he became my handler. He was the handler of all foreign reporters. Some of my [journalist] friends had very bad experiences with him. I can't say I got along with him, but I found a way to deal with him in a way that he was never mean to me, and I think toward the end, he was even quite respectful.

Where did you meet with Mr. X?

At different places. The first time it was at one of the Intelligence Ministry headquarters. The he started inviting me to meet him at hotel rooms, which was extremely creepy in the beginning. I was terrified.

(Later, Mr. X invited her to an apartment) When I went there, I searched the entire house and I went into the kitchen and I took a knife and I hid it in my pocket. I was so embarrassed when I walked in because I kept thinking, 'How was I going to use that knife.'

I wrote under very tight deadlines, so I just didn't have time to think about him. But when he called and summoned me, he always came with a big file. So there were always questions about the stories I had written.

'Why did you draw this conclusion? Why did you write this?' But the good thing about Mr. X, or at least the way he treated me, was he listened.

Why did you think you had to leave Iran?

It was about two-and-a-half weeks after the (presidential) election in 2009. All reporters received a letter that said the ones who worked out of an office were not allowed to leave their offices. I worked out of home, so I ignored the ban, I kept going out, and of course I was writing my stories under my byline, and I think that embarrassed the regime.

One day I got a call from a (militia) commander ... he said that he had heard they had given my photo to snipers to shoot me if they saw me. I continued covering the story and I sort of ignored what he had said.

But then I was on my way to see a (political) analyst and I noticed there were people right outside my apartment building sitting in a car and as soon as they saw me, I noticed another car behind me and two motorcycles. I went back home and I never left my apartment building until the night that we left the country.

After I left the country, I found out that the Intelligence Ministry and people in the judiciary were quite divided over whether they should arrest me or not. So it had taken them a while to issue an arrest warrant for me.

You've said there's a lot of free expression in Iran but that there are things you can't write about. What's going on there?

I've always wondered, how come this regime, after 35 years despite all its efforts, all the money it has spent, all the repressive measure that it has taken, how come it hasn't been able to raise the ideological generation that it desired.

I don't know. That's my question too. Iran has changed in very important ways and the (1979) revolution has been responsible for it. It was the revolution that drew people who lived on the margins of society, people who were in the rural areas, into the center, because they were the regime's support base. It rewarded them by giving them jobs, but giving them good salaries and they moved up in society. And they are exactly the same people who are calling for change and reform now.