Rebecca Solnit post on FB
24 August 2022
The story of student debt is inseparable from the country’s swing to the right that produced tax cuts that meant public education got a lot more expensive, paid for by students rather than by society. The people with means gave themselves a break and dumped a burden on the young, in other words. All those individual stories exist within the context of this collective story. Which is important to remember because it could be reversed and because it undoes the story that it’s individual failing that produced the debt crisis (or that the young should just buck up like grandpa did when the UC system was free and public universities across the country were cheap).
And yeah, there could be footnotes about how private universities jacked up their prices and scam for-profit colleges bilked the naive and how metastasizing bureaucracy also made education a lot more expensive. But this transfer from the public to the private via the tax cuts and the gutting of funding for colleges is a key piece of the story.
There could be other footnotes about how people back when higher education was cheap to free were able to be idealists, to take risks, to make mistakes. I caught the tail end of that, and I feel like I sprinted through college (SFSU, then UCB) as the doors were slamming shut behind me. I’ve heard boomers bitch at the young for being less idealistic, but they’re just less free. Between the higher cost of living, debt, and the ease with which people now fall into the homelessness it’s so hard to climb out of, the homelessness that was pretty rare before Reaganomics, there are a lot of scary forces to keep people on the financial straight and narrow. It’s a harder, crueler world than that peak of economic egalitarianism and funded social safety nets that was the postwar era.
Astra Taylor, who’s been a leader with the Debt Collective for a decade, says it better: “There are 45 million student debtors in the United States. Did each one of those 45 million people just make a terrible mistake? They just somehow failed to really comprehend compound interest? No. When something is that massive, when you have 45 million people all in the same boat, it’s because of the structural issue, because that’s actually the way the economy is set up. One phrase from the Debt Collective book, which we just published maybe six months ago—it’s called Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition—one line from that book is “We are not in debt because we live beyond our means. We are indebted because we are denied the means to live.”
“We’re in debt because we have a basically quasi-privatized education system in this country. The average student graduates from college with $35,000 in student debt, and that of course just balloons because of interest. The United States is buried in medical debt, unlike many other advanced countries, because we don’t have universal health care. This is the only country where thousands and thousands and thousands of people every year go bankrupt because their medical bills, because they got cancer, because one of their family members got sick. So we have a crisis of debt that is not a personal issue. It’s a political issue.” [interview with Paul Holdengraber in Lithub, link in comments]