Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- List of Contributors -- Foreword -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Part I Critical Perspectives on Financing Higher Education in the United States -- 1 Financing Higher Education in the United States: A Historical Overview of Loans in Federal Financial Aid Policy -- 2 Bankruptcy Means-Testing, Austerity Measures, and Student Loan Debt -- 3 African American Student Loan Debt: Deferring the Dream of Higher Education -- 4 Monetary Critique and Student Debt -- Part II The Debt That Won't Go Away: Stories of Non-Dischargeable Student Debt -- 5 The Rise of the Adjuncts: Neoliberalism Invades the Professoriate -- 6 "BFAMFAPhD": An Adjunct Professor's Personal Experience With Student Debt Long After Leaving Graduate School -- 7 Debt(s) We Can't Walk Out On: National Adjunct Walkout Day, Complicity, and the Neoliberal Threat to Social Movements in the Academy -- 8 Misplaced Faith in the American Dream: Buried in Debt in the Catacombs of the Ivory Tower -- 9 An Adjunct Professor's Communication Barriers With Neoliberal Student Debt Collectors -- 10 "Golden Years" in the Red: Student Loan Debt as Economic Slavery -- 11 Should I Go Back to College? -- Part III Alternatives to American Neoliberal Financing of Higher Education -- 12 Free Tuition: Prospects for Extending Free Schooling Into the Postsecondary Years -- 13 "Work Colleges" as an Alternative to Student Loan Debt -- 14 It Takes More Than a Village, It Takes a Nation -- 15 Monetary Transformation and Public Education -- 16 Reflections on the Future: Setting the Agenda for a Post-Neoliberal U.S. Higher Education -- Name Index -- Subject Index

The majority of what gets written about student loan debt ties rapidly rising tuition to state disinvestment, cost disease, among other forces that are internal or external to the academy. The neoliberal regime of truth is that a college education is worth incurring student loan debt. Human capital is the motif. The financial "payoff" is seen as a logical reason to go to college and to "invest" in one's future. This book offers a counter-perspective. The editor of this volume places the debt crisis within a "Wicked Problem" framework to help explain why the student debt crisis in U.S. Higher Education doesn't seem to be getting better despite valiant attempts to do so. The complexity of higher education financing and policy is immense, and it is no coincidence that change is slow. The chapters in this book will point out that while the main culprit for why students continue to graduate with more and more student loan debt is not individual choice, but rather evidence of the neoliberal ecosystem of higher education, itself.

Capturing the voices of Americans living with student debt in the United States, this collection critiques the neoliberal interest-driven, debt-based system of U.S. higher education and offers alternatives to neoliberal capitalism and the corporatized university. Grounded in an understanding of the historical and political economic context, this book offers auto-ethnographic experiences of living in debt, and analyzes alternatives to the current system. Chapter authors address real questions such as, Do collegians overestimate the economic value of going to college? and How does the monetary system that student loans are part of operate? Pinpointing how developments in the political economy are accountable for students’ university experiences, this book provides an authoritative contribution to research in the fields of educational foundations and higher education policy and finance.

Capturing the voices of Americans living with student debt in the United States, this collection critiques the neoliberal interest-driven, debt-based system of U.S. higher education and offers alternatives to neoliberal capitalism and the corporatized university. Grounded in an understanding of the historical and political economic context, this book offers auto-ethnographic experiences of living in debt, and analyzes alternatives to the current system. Chapter authors address real questions such as, Do collegians overestimate the economic value of going to college? and How does the monetary system that student loans are part of operate? Pinpointing how developments in the political economy are accountable for students’ university experiences, this book provides an authoritative contribution to research in the fields of educational foundations and higher education policy and finance.

This book analyzes reliable evidence to tell the true story of student debt in America. One of the nation’s foremost experts on college finance, Sandy Baum exposes how misleading the widely accepted narrative on student debt is. Baum combines data, research, and analysis to show how the current discourse obscures serious problems, risks misdirecting taxpayer dollars, and could deprive too many Americans of the educational opportunities they deserve. This book and its policy recommendations provide the basis for a new and more constructive national agenda to make paying for college more manageable.

"The dramatic untold story of the student loan debt crisis in America. In 1981, a new executive at the student loan giant Sallie Mae took home the company's financial documents to review. 'You've got to be shitting me,' he later told the company's CEO. 'This place is a gold mine.' Far from making college affordable, the student loan system has created a college-industrial complex that has submerged multiple generations in debt. For millions, their college investment turned into a nightmare: 43 million people owe a combined $1.6 trillion in student debt, more than both credit card debt and car loans. How did we get here? Acclaimed Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Mitchell's landmark investigation is the first book to tell the full story of the student loan debt crisis in America. Mitchell shows how the program began in the 1950s, evolved into a grand social experiment in the 1960s, got overtaken by greedy colleges in the 1980s and 1990s, and was unleashed in the 2000s by Sallie Mae, the billion-dollar company that turned student lending into big business. Based on eight years of reporting and hundreds of interviews with the decision-makers who crafted the program, The Debt Trap never loses sight of the countless student victims whose lives have been forever altered by a predatory lending system. Mitchell's defining book shows how the narrative of higher education as a ticket to the American Dream fueled the rise of a rapacious system that one of its original architects called a 'monster'".--From dust jacket.

With unprecedented student debt keeping an entire generation from realizing the "American Dream," this book sounds a warning about how that debt may undermine both higher education—and our democracy. American higher education boasts one of the most impressive legacies in the world, but the price of admission for many is now endless debt. As this book shows, increasing educational indebtedness undermines the real value of higher education in our democracy. To help readers understand this dilemma, the book examines how student debt became commonplace and what the long-term effects of such an ongoing reality might be. Sold My Soul for a Student Loan examines this vitally important issue from an unprecedented diversity of perspectives, focusing on the fact that student debt is hindering the ability of millions of people to enter the job market, the housing market, the consumer economy, and the political process. Among other topics, the book covers the history of consumer debt in the United States, the history of federal policy toward higher education, and political action in response to the issue of student debt. Perhaps most importantly, it explores the new relationship debtor-citizens have to the government as a result of debt, and how that impacts democracy for a new generation.