Burdened

Starred review from August 19, 2024
Journalist Liebenthal debuts with a trenchant examination of how higher education became unaffordable for all but the wealthiest Americans. Tracing the origins of the issue to the 1944 GI Bill, she suggests the law established a harmful precedent that the best way to broaden access to higher education is to help students pay high tuition costs, rather than legislating costs down. The wrongheaded individualistic focus continued under subsequent administrations, Liebenthal argues, discussing how a 1965 law that federally insured student loans made by commercial banks lined bankers’ pockets while doing nothing to stem rising tuition. Liebenthal has predictably harsh words for the Reagan administration’s reduction of federal student aid by $2 billion, which forced young people to take on even greater debt. Elsewhere, Liebenthal covers Joe Biden’s thwarted efforts to forgive billions of dollars in student debt and urges legislators to increase funding for public universities and require any higher educational institutions accepting government funding to become public. Liebenthal’s remarkably lucid policy discussions are accompanied by penetrating big-picture analysis. For example, she posits that the difficulty of affording higher education compels students to orient their studies around preparing for lucrative careers, diminishing the idea that education can be an end in itself. This incisive cri de coeur brings clarity to an ostensibly intractable problem. Agent: Melissa Flashman, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.

September 1, 2024
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 onpublic: 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.

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