Student debt is important enough for 2 books at once
As I faced down my copies of “Indentured Students: How Government Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in College Debt” by Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, an assistant professor of history at Loyola in Chicago, and “The Debt Trap: How Student Loans Became a National Catastrophe” by Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Mitchell, I wondered why we needed two books on the same subject released on the exact same day.
As it turns out, these two books on student loan debt each have important contributions to make on the current debate about what to do with existing student loan debt, while even leaving room for more discussion of what should be done to help students on higher education institutions moving forward.
One message made clear by both books is that our current system, which cobbles together scholarships, grants and myriad different types of loans, is byzantine, confusing and dysfunctional. At no time in the long history of these programs did anyone of power and influence sit down and think through the issue by asking what might result in the most efficient and cost-effective approach to making higher education accessible to nonrich people.
Instead, post-secondary education and its financing were looked at as a marketplace where empowered student consumers would make decisions that would somehow induce institutions to compete in a way that would result in an intersection of high quality and reasonable cost.
It didn’t work out that way because this was an act of wishful thinking mixed with a healthy portion of greed. As state funding drained steadily from the public system, institutions were forced to compete on prestige, fueling a vicious cycle as institutional funds went toward marketing and recruiting and away from teaching and learning as institutions had to compete across state lines to capture that sweet nonresident tuition revenue.
Community colleges and regional public universities, institutions designed to serve the people literally in their communities, have lost out, doing the best they can in a game that’s rigged against them.
As both books show, none of this made much sense in the beginning, and makes less sense now.
There’s clear differences between the books, which should read as virtues rooted in the authors’ orientations and choices.
In her book’s dedication, Shermer self-identifies as one of the individuals burdened under the cumulative $1.7 trillion in student loan debt. Her skills as an academic and researcher result in a deep historic dive into the progression of the system through its origins and early decades.
Mitchell, the reporter, grounds each chapter in a topic (e.g., the machinations of student loan servicer Sallie Mae, for-profit colleges, etc.) and individual characters, using original reporting to paint a vivid and compelling story of the “monster” the current system has become. It’s a compelling portrait.
“The Debt Trap” is written for a more general audience and will likely find a much bigger audience because of it, but if you want to be more fully informed on this issue, “Indentured Students” is equally important. Shermer’s book is a sustained indictment of the entire edifice.
Mitchell concludes by recommending some policy changes around loans, such as forgiving interest on student loans, restricting loans for graduate degrees and making community college free, which are all sensible and good, and would likely help many students navigating the current system. This is the work of a reporter who is required to stay separate from the fray. It nibbles at a problem Mitchell’s own book demonstrates requires deeper reform.
Unless we confront the lie that competing for student tuition is good for higher education institutions, we’ll never end this catastrophe.
John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.”