BURDENED

A well-reasoned argument for remaking the federal student-loan system.

Mother Jones writer Liebenthal, who confesses to carrying a heavy debt load herself, examines the system by which so many college students find themselves owing thousands and even hundreds of thousands of dollars to loan agencies—and, too often, in jobs that offer little hope of ever paying them back. Liebenthal traces that system to the GI Bill, which paid out $7 billion after World War II for 2 million veterans to attend college; the economic productivity in tax revenue alone was $12 billion, so that the grants paid for themselves. Yet that’s not how lawmakers, and particularly conservatives, want to think of loans: they’re private and not collective goods, with education itself “a commodity delivering benefits to individuals, who must also bear its costs.” Hidden within the GI Bill system, then, Liebenthal asserts, are mousetrap conditions meant to disqualify aspirant minorities from those benefits. The results linger: today, she holds, “women hold two-thirds of all debt and earn 26 percent less than men do from their degrees,” while Black students have double the debt of whites. These are not evenly distributed: public schools are more burdened than private ones (only 3 percent of Harvard undergrads, she notes, take out loans). Liebenthal proposes a general amnesty, noting that if the loans were forgiven, the massive debt (more than $1.6 trillion by some measures) would be redirected into the economy as consumer spending, benefiting the whole of society. Moreover, she argues, “we need a massive new investment in public higher education,” with an emphasis on public: private schools such as Harvard and especially for-profit schools, she urges, should be ineligible for federal support.

A strong case for turning onerous student loans to more economically productive ends—and for rethinking them altogether.