Burdened
Ratings1
Average rating4
15
Ratings1
Average rating4
An urgent investigation of student debt in America revealing the corrupt systems, rotten policies, and bad actors that have created a $1.7 trillion crisis. College costs more today than ever and is worth less. Tuition at public colleges has more than tripled in the past 50 years. Over the same period student debt has grown from virtually nothing to more than $1.7 trillion, second only to home mortgages. Skyrocketing student-loan burdens are leading an entire generation to put off the traditional milestones of adulthood: buying homes, getting married, starting families, and saving for retirement. The burden weighs heavier on women and black Americans, and with almost 10 percent of student debtors now over the age of 60, it is a crisis no longer limited to the young. Ryann Liebenthal's Burdened tells the maddening story of how the power plays of legislators and presidents, the commodification of higher ed, and the rapacious practices of for-profit colleges and private lenders have created today's student-debt lava pit. As the notion of student-loan cancellation percolates into the political mainstream, Liebenthal offers a deeply researched, sweeping narrative of our broken system. Rather than give in to despair, she boldly charts a way out, offering hopeful solutions to this seemingly unfixable problem.
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She is a good writer and did a good job exposing the key moments and decisions that set us on this disastrous path where, as she quotes Rohit Chopra as saying, “Students aren’t the customers, they are the products.” But the book falls a little short in several ways — first, she seems to feel obliged to add the obligatory “Wave a magic wand” chapter in which she imagines a complete overhaul of higher education from top to bottom on a national scale . . . Not that many pages after briefly discussing the Supreme Court’s final transformation into a National Policy Council, wherein it gets to decide which decisions are major and which are not, thereby allowing its Federalist Society members to determine — absent any constitutional basis whatsoever — which administration policies may be enacted through executive action and which must come through Congress as “major questions.” So, in a country where even the plain language of the law allows the administration to forgive student loan debts (just as the IRS routinely forgives tax debts) but the Supreme Court insists otherwise, a chapter on magical reforms is just wasted.
Better she should have spent her time comparing our debacle in education funding to our debacle in health care funding, housing policy, conservation, immigration, and mental health systems — all areas of enormous public failure because of the retreat from the idea of these areas as essentially public questions into simply battles over private entitlement. She talks about the transformation of education after the GI Bill from a public good to a private investment, and the book would have benefitted greatly from putting that hideous transformation into context by showing how the same impoverished thinking that has led higher education into its weakened and enervated state has been operating across every other public policy aspect as well.
