student debt

• 
• SOURCE: Lux
  3/1/2023
  

  With SCOTUS Poised to Block Modest Debt Relief, What's Next for Debt Abolitionists?

  by Eleni Schirmer

  Organizing debtors to demand and achieve forgiveness—or abolition—of debt requires convincing people that indebtedness exposes social, not individual, failures. 

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• SOURCE: The New Republic
  2/27/2023
  

  The Lost Promise of College for All

  by Jack Schneider and Jennifer C. Berkshire

  The expansion of college education—and the encouragement directed at all Americans to pursue a degree—was driven by bipartisan agreement that education could increase prosperity and alleviate inequality. Unfortunately, without a commitment to public provision, the price has been massive individual debt. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  9/13/2022
  

  The Half-Century Road to the Student Debt Crisis

  by John Thelin

  A fatal mistake made by Congress in 1972 was to expand aid to students, imagined as consumers, through the Guaranteed Student Loan program, instead of subsidizing institutions to control costs. 

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• 8/26/2022
  

  Historians Respond to Biden's Student Debt Relief Order

  How are historians responding to the Biden administration's order to forgive $10,000 of student debt for borrowers with incomes under $125,000?

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• SOURCE: The Conversation
  7/26/2022
  

  Is There a Biblical Solution to the Modern Problem of Debt?

  by Eva von Dassow

  Many are inspired by Old Testament rules for debt jubilees, but, while the practice has a historical basis, that history shows debt forgiveness was part of an unequal society in which forgiving old debts simply enabled the masses to take on new ones. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  5/31/2022
  

  Senator (and History PhD) Ben Sasse: How to Fix Higher Education

  The Senator says that large-scale student debt relief would leave in place the dysfunctional features of higher education. Find out what he, presumably in a position to do something, thinks would work better.

• 
• 1/9/2021
  

  Debt Jubilees: An Ancient Solution for a Modern Problem

  by Richard Vague

  "Like our ancient forefathers, we need to reset our economy by offering hard-pressed debtors a jubilee now, not in some utopian future."

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  8/5/2021
  

  Policymakers in the 1960s Laid the Groundwork for the Student Debt Crisis. Policymakers Today Can Undo It.

  by Elizabeth Tandy Shermer

  "Lawmakers purposefully crafted the Guaranteed Student Loan Program to jump-start a student loan industry — instead of really investing in colleges and universities to keep costs down or forcing them to provide young people with genuinely equal opportunities to enroll."

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• SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
  4/22/2021
  

  The Crushing Contradictions of the American University

  by Chad Wellmon

  The proliferation of student loan debt reflects the acceptance by banks, borrowers, and the federal government of the idea that higher education is transformative and beneficial. Is this ideology bordering on magical thinking? 

• 
• SOURCE: In These Times
  1/26/2021
  

  Columbia Students Wage the Largest Tuition Strike in Nearly 50 Years

  "Organizers say that at least 1,100 students are now actively withholding tuition, and a petition in support of the strike has so far collected more than 4,300 student signatures." 

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• SOURCE: Harvard Magazine
  9/8/2020
  

  “Attacking the Concept of Debt”: Challenging Predatory Student Loans Runs Up Against a Long History

  A Harvard Law School initiative to check predatory student lending must contend with the entanglement of federal student lending programs and for-profit education providers, which dates to the Servicemen's Readjustment Act (GI Bill of Rights) of 1944. 

• 
• SOURCE: Salon
  5/27/2019
  

  Billionaires can't fix college: Jim Sleeper on the real crisis in higher education

  by Jim Sleeper

  In this conversation between historian Matthew Frye Jacobson and Professor Jim Sleeper, they discuss how to reclaim college from market ideology

• 
• SOURCE: The Nation
  3-23-15
  

  It’s Time to End Tuition at Public Universities—and Abolish Student Debt

  by Jon Wiener

  In America today, people owe more on their student loans than they do on their credit cards. But there’s a simple and elegant way to end this travesty.

• SOURCE: CNN.com
  6-25-13
  

  Claire Potter: Big Debt for Students, Big Perks for University Elites

  Claire Potter is a professor of history at the New School for Public Engagement. She blogs at Tenured Radical for the Chronicle of Higher Education. New York University's 2010 graduating class owed a total of more than $600 million in student loans. It's unlikely the university will forgive them. But NYU has forgiven portions of mortgages they have extended to President John Sexton, other university executives or star faculty - money that has been used to buy properties in Manhattan or vacation homes in the Hamptons.Does this shock you?Or, how about this: Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, a former executive vice president at NYU, received an "exit bonus" of $685,000. Just to put this in perspective, Lew's NYU exit bonus alone would have provided free tuition for 275 undergraduates, or a little more than 17% of the incoming class.