Why fears about a looming student loan crisis are unfounded—and how they obscure what's really wrong with student lending College tuition and student debt levels have been rising at an alarming pace for at least two decades. These trends, coupled with an economy weakened by a major recession, have raised serious questions about whether we are headed for a major crisis, with borrowers defaulting on their loans in unprecedented numbers and taxpayers being forced to foot the bill. Game of Loans draws on new evidence to explain why such fears are misplaced—and how the popular myth of a looming crisis has obscured the real problems facing student lending in America. Bringing needed clarity to an issue that concerns all of us, Beth Akers and Matthew Chingos cut through the sensationalism and misleading rhetoric to make the compelling case that college remains a good investment for most students. They show how, in fact, typical borrowers face affordable debt burdens, and argue that the truly serious cases of financial hardship portrayed in the media are less common than the popular narrative would have us believe. But there are more troubling problems with student loans that don't receive the same attention. They include high rates of avoidable defaults by students who take on loans but don’t finish college—the riskiest segment of borrowers—and a dysfunctional market where competition among colleges drives tuition costs up instead of down. Persuasive and compelling, Game of Loans moves beyond the emotionally charged and politicized talk surrounding student debt, and offers a set of sensible policy proposals that can solve the real problems in student lending.

The student loan debt crisis has mushroomed into a national crisis, with 43 million Americans in debt for having gone to college. Their total debt is a whopping $1.3 trillion dollars. That's roughly 1 in 8 Americans that owes money for getting a higher education and trying to better himself or herself. The problem can no longer be approached at the individual level, with each person trying to figure out how to deal with the costs of higher education. We need a new national-level examination of the costs of higher education and how to fix the crisis. This book is for students, parents, and policy-makers.

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.

As of 2019, Americans owed over 1.56 trillion dollars in student loan debt, and 69 percent of college students who graduated in 2018 had to take out student loans. Student debt has increased significantly over the past twenty years, but what factors have brought this about? Are students to blame for making irresponsible financial decisions, or is the price of education rising disproportionately to average income? How do variables like class and race impact student debt? What impact do these debts have on individuals and the economy? This volume examines the nature of America's student debt crisis and explores possible solutions.

The Student Loan Scam is an exposé of the predatory nature of the $85-billion student loan industry. In this in-depth exploration, Collinge argues that student loans have become the most profitable, uncompetitive, and oppressive type of debt in American history. This has occurred in large part due to federal legislation passed since the mid-1990s that removed standard consumer protections from student loans-and allowed for massive penalties and draconian wealth-extraction mechanisms to collect this inflated debt. High school graduates can no longer put themselves through college for a few thousand dollars in loan debt. Today, the average undergraduate borrower leaves school with more than $20,000 in student loans, and for graduate students the average is a whopping $42,000. For the past twenty years, college tuition has increased at more than double the rate of inflation, with the cost largely shifting to student debt. Collinge covers the history of student loans, the rise of Sallie Mae, and how universities have profited at the expense of students. The book includes candid and compelling stories from people across the country about how both nonprofit and for-profit student loan companies, aided by poor legislation, have shattered their lives-and livelihoods. With nearly 5 million defaulted loans, this crisis is growing to epic proportions. The Student Loan Scam takes an unflinching look at this unprecedented and pressing problem, while exposing the powerful organizations and individuals who caused it to happen. Ultimately, Collinge argues for the return of standard consumer protections for student loans, among other pragmatic solutions, in this clarion call for social action.

WINNER of the BISA IPEG Book Prize 2015 http://www.bisa-ipeg.org/ipeg-book-prize-2015-winner-announced/ Under the rubric of ‘financial inclusion’, lending to the poor –in both the global North and global South –has become a highly lucrative and rapidly expanding industry since the 1990s. A key inquiry of this book is what is ‘the financial’ in which the poor are asked to join. Instead of embracing the mainstream position that financial inclusion is a natural, inevitable and mutually beneficial arrangement, Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry suggests that the structural violence inherent to neoliberalism and credit-led accumulation have created and normalized a reality in which the working poor can no longer afford to live without expensive credit. The book further transcends economic treatments of credit and debt by revealing how the poverty industry is extricably linked to the social power of money, the paradoxes in credit-led accumulation, and ‘debtfarism’. The latter refers to rhetorical and regulatory forms of governance that mediate and facilitate the expansion of the poverty industry and the reliance of the poor on credit to augment/replace their wages. Through a historically grounded analysis, the author examines various dimensions of the poverty industry ranging from the credit card, payday loan, and student loan industries in the United States to micro-lending and low-income housing finance industries in Mexico. Providing a much-needed theorization of the politics of debt, Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry has wider implications of the increasing dependence of the poor on consumer credit across the globe, this book will be of very strong interest to students and scholars of Global Political Economy, Finance, Development Studies, Geography, Law, History, and Sociology. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315761954, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lU6PHjyOzU

America is suffering from a debt crisis, cased by insane levels of student loans. Wages have only increased 67% since 1970, yet student loans are exploding to record levels, year after year. This, along with soaring cost of living, has made it nearly impossible for ordinary millennials who go to college, to become financially independent in the richest country on earth. If you go to college and study most degrees and use the information you learned in your degree in the workforce, the American dream is dead. As an entrepreneur who's looking to hire millennials, I can tell you that most graduates don't have a clue how to help my businesses.Not only that, they're in a constant state of fear and panic. Even if I pay them a great wage, they can't afford to make ends meet due to their obscene student loans, often at high interest rates. They're trying to get married, buy a house and have kids, yet their crippling loans makes it impossible.Many millennials are ostracised from the dating scene, because they're simply too poor from student loans to date. It's affecting their self-image, self esteem and confidence. 1.Total student loan debt is over $1.5 Trillion2.College tuition has increased 213% since 19803.More than 3 million people aged 65+ are still paying off their student loans4.As of May 2018, 101 people owe at least $1m in unpaid student loans5.Black families carry more debt than white families and they're more likely to default on their loans.6.40% of student will default on their loans by 20237.49% of total loan value in bankruptcies are student loans. They're unforgivable by bankruptcy 8.13% of of Americans surveyed last year said they've decided not to have kids because their student loan debt is so high9.Student loan defaults are higher than the 2008 mortgage crisis10.50% of millennials think college wasn't worthwhileThis message is for concerned parents who worry about the future of their children/teenagers. It's also for people worried if going to college/university in the 21st century will help them get ahead in life. It's also for people stuck in a student loan crisis, looking to finally learn how to create a high income. I'm writing this because I wish someone gave me this advice when I was 16 and I was being shouted at for not going to university. I was told that I'd never be successful. I was told that my life would be so miserable, it wouldn't be worth living. I believe that college died a painful death this century. No longer does a child need a formal education to get ahead in life. College in the United States of America has turned into a horrible scam, enriching a few at the top of the pyramid, while the teachers and students suffer. Do you think the children of the people that own these colleges go to university? The children of people making 10's of millions of dollars per year?It's turned middle class children of the future into debt slaves. Unless these debt slaves somehow find a way to produce an exceptionally high income, they'll never be able to create the levels of upward social mobility seen before in previous generations. Parents know it, kids know it, college has turned into a scam. Unless you want to be a doctor, lawyer, engineer, accountant, nurse, or something that needs a degree, you're better off not signing the dotted line on a 6-figure loan. From the statistics you'll see and learn about in this book, even a high income career isn't enough. Not only do I show the problems, I provide solutions. This could be the book that helps you finally sell them on the idea that you don't need to go to college/university to become successful. I was able to become successful without crippling loans. I want the same for you too.

"Student loan debt in the U.S. now exceeds $1 trillion, more than the nation's credit-card debt. This timely book explains how and why student loans evolved, the concerns they've raised along the way, and how each policy designed to fix student loans winds up making things worse. The authors, a father and son team, provide an intergenerational, interdisciplinary approach to understanding how, over the last 70 years, Americans incrementally, with the best intentions, created our current student loan disaster. They examine the competing interests and shifting societal expectations that contributed to the problem, and offer recommendations for confronting the larger problem of college costs and student borrowing in the future"--

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 untold history of how AmericaÕs student-loan program turned the pursuit of higher education into a pathway to poverty. It didnÕt always take thirty years to pay off the cost of a bachelorÕs degree. Elizabeth Tandy Shermer untangles the history that brought us here and discovers that the story of skyrocketing college debt is not merely one of good intentions gone wrong. In fact, the federal student loan program was never supposed to make college affordable. The earliest federal proposals for college affordability sought to replace tuition with taxpayer funding of institutions. But Southern whites feared that lower costs would undermine segregation, Catholic colleges objected to state support of secular institutions, professors worried that federal dollars would come with regulations hindering academic freedom, and elite-university presidents recoiled at the idea of mass higher education. Cold War congressional fights eventually made access more important than affordability. Rather than freeing colleges from their dependence on tuition, the government created a loan instrument that made college accessible in the short term but even costlier in the long term by charging an interest penalty only to needy students. In the mid-1960s, as bankers wavered over the prospect of uncollected debt, Congress backstopped the loans, provoking runaway inflation in college tuition and resulting in immense lender profits. Today 45 million Americans owe more than $1.5 trillion in college debt, with the burdens falling disproportionately on borrowers of color, particularly women. Reformers, meanwhile, have been frustrated by colleges and lenders too rich and powerful to contain. Indentured Students makes clear that these are not unforeseen consequences. The federal student loan system is working as designed.