Occupying Student Debt

[marmar]

from Dissent magazine:



Occupying Student Debt
Jeffrey Williams - January 30, 2012 1:20 pm


College student loan debt is a defining political issue of the rising generation. There is good news and there is bad news: it’s good that it’s finally become a mainstream issue, one that politicians feel the need to address (as President Obama did in last week’s State of the Union) and that major media sometimes report on. It’s bad, of course, because a rising majority lives under its cloud, while at the same time facing shrinking job prospects and other economic conditions that belie anything like an American dream of prosperity for all. Instead, there is a new, high-stakes dream: that one might hit it big and become a member of the investor class, while the rest are left behind.

In “Student Debt and the Spirit of Indenture” (2008), I showed how this new form of indebtedness is like indentured servitude. The analogy resonates far more than one would expect. Student debt is usually considered a transport to a job; it’s secured by the person, not property; it has grown to substantial amounts and terms; it breeds an extensive banking system; and it’s enforced by law and governmental mandate. In the prequel to that article, “Debt Education” (2006), I wrote about the way that student debt rewrites the social contract for education, transforming it from a public service and common right to a privatized service and individual purchase. It is a pedagogy different than the one advertised—higher education teaches two-thirds of the student body, in blunt material terms, not humanistic ideals nor freedom of thought but that students are consumers who justly face a decade of financial constraint after college.

In the midst of all the new attention focused on the issue, I want to remind Dissenters that student debt is not the result of the so-called financial crisis; it has germinated since around 1980, and finally began to fester in the 2000s. It rose from relatively minor amounts—from an average of about $2,000 in 1982—to about $9,000 in 1992, $22,000 in 2002, and approaching $27,000 now.

Why? It was not because of inflation, which increased by a factor of less than two-and-a-half in the same period ($2,000 in 1982 is $4,483 in current dollars), nor because of inevitable movements of the market. It is because debt is a policy. It was a product of the deregulation of banking, particularly of non-secured loans, as well as the defunding of public services that started in, as Sean Wilentz has recently named it, the Age of Reagan. It is also a class policy, since two-thirds of students have it, but one-third has none. In other words, it is an issue of social justice. While it is daunting, it is a policy we can change. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/atw.php?id=665