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Biden recently announced his student loan forgiveness plan and it sucks. Assuming that
its projected cost of $300 billion dollars is how much debt will be forgiven, all this
plan will do is take us from here, to here. Biden’s plan includes no significant reforms
to education tuition or loans, and the government has told us those reforms aren’t coming,
so it’s fair to assume that the only thing Biden has done is buy about 4 or 5 years and
we’ll soon be right back here, with $1.7 trillion dollars of student loan debt.
[[Millions of Americans will get some relief, and that’s good, but millions more will
just take their place very soon, and that’s bad. How did we ever get to this point, with
a canadian-GDP-sized hole in students’ pockets? As usual, we can thank Ronald Reagan.]]
Our story begins in the late 60s and early 70s, when colleges suddenly started charging
tuition.
The late 60s, early 70s were in many ways, a groovy time, but in many other, probably
more important ways, they were a very *not* groovy time. The 60s had The Beatles, The
Beach Boys, *and* the relentless un-aliving of Vietnamese, and other quote unquote “Indochinese,”
citizens in a nearly two-decades long conflict involving millions of tons of bombs dropped
on civilians and a brutal campaign of chemical warfare, the devastating consequences of which
continue to affect multiple countries to this day. [[What an era. I promise this video is
still about student loans. Stay with me.]]
Few things affected the 60s and 70s like the Vietnam War did. Over the course of these
decades, Americans were progressively exposed to more and more of the suffering inflicted
by their own country abroad, as images of the conflict and leaked military documents
began circulating in the American press. The Vietnam War showcased untold violence, served
almost no purpose to the average American, and only really benefited the US’s bloated
war industry. So, eventually, Americans began protesting this brutal and useless war, mobilizing
all across the country, and most importantly, on college campuses.
[[This is where the problems began. While the thought of ending an already decade-long,
expensive, cruel, and soon-to-be-lost war might make most people happy, it made one
California governor very not happy. Cue Ronald Reagan.]]
At this time, two things were true. California’s UC schools charged no tuition for in-state
residents and Ronald Reagan had just won his second term in office. As a conservative and
a fierce supporter of the Vietnam War, all these protests happening on California college
campuses were deeply upsetting to Ronald. They challenged the ruling government in a
very public way, so, in response, Reagan *shut down all 28 UC and Cal State campuses.* [[That
might seem excessive, and it was, but what you need to understand is that these protests
weren’t just upsetting or a simple act of vocal political opposition. These protests
were deeply worrying to Reagan and the rest of his friends because of what they signaled
for the future.]] In the words of one of Reagan’s top advisors, these protests signaled the
coming of a dangerous quote “educated proletariat.” Saying, quote “We have to be selective on
who we allow to go through higher education.” Meaning, of course, we need to stop letting
all these poor people in, they’re starting to get the idea that they can change society.
That’s because up to that point, many American colleges had been either free to access, with
zero tuition fees for in-state residents, or cost very little. Adjusted for inflation,
education before the late 60s and 70s maxed out in the ballpark of a couple thousand dollars
at an elite private school like Dartmouth. [[Most Americans who went to college did so
for very little money. Just for reference, the Education Data Initiative estimates that
today,]] “​the ultimate price of a bachelor’s degree may be as high as half a million dollars
or as low as 100k in the best case scenario, for a public, 4-year degree at an in-state
institution. [[But just because it was a lot cheaper didn’t mean college was necessarily
always accessible. Historically, colleges were filled almost exclusively by white upper-class
young men. And that’s because, for most poor people, the opportunity cost of college
was too high.]] Spending time not earning money when basic needs were harder to meet
didn’t make sense for most Americans, especially when a high school education was enough for
a middle-class status. But that’s far from the whole picture. Colleges were filled with
upper class, white young men because women, black people, and non-christians, meaning
jewish people specifically, were either flat out prohibited from attending college, segregated
into separate institutions, or subjected to maximum enrollment quotas. [[All in all, college
was cheap at least in part because it didn’t need to be expensive to keep the lower classes
and other marginalized groups out.]]
But eventually that would change. Starting in the 20th century, college began affording
upward mobility for more and more members of the working class and its opportunity cost
lowered. Exclusionary policies were very slowly dropped, and government programs like the
GI bill allowed WWII veterans to attend college at no cost. College became more accessible
in the 20th century so enrollment grew, particularly in the lower classes who had been kept out
for so long. [[And that became a problem for the ruling class. As Reagan’s advisor told
the press, educating the proletariat had the undesirable effect of producing revolutionary
stirrings. A college education gave thousands of people unprecedented time, and to some
extent, tools to criticize the inequality and violence that characterized their lives
and the whole of the US.]] Far from being indoctrination centers, colleges had the merit
of at the very least exposing students to non-capitalist ideas, though often in less
than positive terms (to put it mildly). To some, that was enough. Colleges also had the
benefit of being a place for communities to form and to gather, and the convergence of
all these different factors meant that college campuses suddenly became a new place where
militant opposition to the government and the greater economic system could form, a
fact that was very concerning to the people who benefitted from the inequality and violence
of American society going unquestioned and unchallenged. [[This is why the 60s are remembered
as a time of student protest. And the Vietnam protests specifically were particularly concerning
because, over time, they resonated with a lot of the American public. What if they grew?
What if they became about something more fundamental than a single war? What if… they started
a revolution?]]
Now that might seem like a big leap, but Reagan and his buddies had reason to be worried.
Student revolutions were not unheard of and just two years before Reagan shut down UC
and Cal state campuses, France had witnessed the events of “May 68.” For almost two
months, France saw student protests in Paris turn into a semi-coherent, country-wide revolutionary
movement, with a general strike that completely shut down the country’s economy. During
this proto-revolution, protestors attempted to bring an end to general De Gaulle’s government,
secure higher wages, run their own factories, and who knows, maybe even introduce socialism
to the Western country at a large scale. And although this movement ultimately co-ordinated
millions of people, what had been so concerning to anti-socialist observers was that it started
with the protests of only a couple hundred students. [[While May 68 never became a full
revolution, and failed in many important ways to achieve its goals, it nourished the idea
that socialism could still get popular support even in prosperous, Western, capitalist countries
*and* made college campuses a new place for these movements to emerge.]]
So Reagan quickly shut down the Vietnam protests and from then on made every effort to cut
the working class out of higher education. To do that, Reagan, alongside then-president
Richard Nixon, progressively transitioned colleges away from the state and federal funding
model that had made them decently accessible up to that point. The public was told this
was part of the “small-government,” cost-cutting effort, and that the state needed to make
immediate budget cuts, despite Nixon simultaneously kickstarting the ludicrously expensive war
on drugs, which, to date has cost America a conservative $1 trillion dollars through
increased incarceration, policing, and police militarization.
In a 1967 speech, Reagan said it plainly. “There is the problem we just simply have
a shortage of dollars. It is hard to believe there is no leeway for cost cutting in the
University program.”
With enough public support, states and the federal government started cutting off higher
education. As a result, colleges across the country would increasingly need to rely on
tuition for their finances, a tuition that would easily snowball thanks to the kinds
of predatory loans we have all grown accustomed to. And Reagan and Nixon got their desired
result. By making college expensive to attend, those who have an easier time accessing loans,
or who flat out do not need loans to afford it, go to college at a much higher rate. In
2013, for example, college enrollment for kids from low-income families was under half
that of high-income enrollment.
[[The result is that the transition to an expensive, tuition-based college model has
cut off the working class from one of its places of emancipation and collective organizing.
Not the only one, but an important one nonetheless. If you think that "woke culture" is what's
suppressing free speech on college campuses, consider how much more it hurts free speech
to keep millions of working class Americans out of the conversation entirely.]] The shift
to a tuition-based model purposefully and successfully handicapped collective power.
And expensive college education has also prevented more members of the working class from achieving
individual power. After all, 95% of the House and 100% of the Senate has a bachelor's or
more, many from the most expensive and elite colleges. In other words, the odds of getting
to a place where members of the working class might be able to represent their own interests
and translate them into action are actively stacked against them from the start.
[[But there’s a problem. The government can't just tell the poor they can't go to
college outright or make it so obviously difficult. There needs to be some sort of justification.
Otherwise, in political communication terms, telling the poor to get lost is what is commonly
referred to as a “stupid f***ing move.” Thus, a series of narratives have emerged
to try to justify this ideological commitment to exclusion.]] The first was the idea that
the government absolutely needed to cost-cut, as we’ve seen. For that, the demonization
of college students as violent, reckless, or borderline idiotic hippies made college
an easy target. But it doesn’t stop there. When this shift inevitably made colleges more
expensive to attend, loans, despite being incredibly predatory as we now know, were
pitched as a form of inclusivity.
In that same speech I quoted earlier, Reagan said as much, telling concerned working class
Americans that “This suggestion [to charge tuition] resulted in the almost hysterical
charge that this would deny educational opportunities to those of the most moderate means. This
is obviously untrue [...] we made it plain that tuition must be accompanied by adequate
loans.”
Obviously Reagan made no mention of how punishing these loans would be once students had graduated,
but he could rely on the popular imagination of a college education leading to a stable,
middle-class, American Dream lifestyle not to address that.
Then Reagan went on to cite a second reason why members of the working class shouldn’t
be worried they were suddenly getting cut off from higher ed: quote, “More important
is the false impression given that enrollment in the University is now in some way based
on the ability to pay. This is not true. Eligibility for the University actually is limited to
those in the top 12 percent scholastically. On this principle 88 percent of the high school
students cannot go to the University regardless of their finances or their desires.”
In light of the emerging discourse that college was becoming a right, accessible to all, conservatives
reacted by firmly digging their heels in the ground and made sure higher education would
continue to be seen only as a privilege. Because when higher education is a privilege, only
those who are deemed deserving can get it. This was great because it appealed to the
idea that hard work and natural talent alone would push our society’s best into a place
where they could grow their skills. But what wasn’t said was that “deservingness”
would obviously be assessed with metrics that favor the wealthy, like SAT tests. Then, this
idea that a college education had to be deserved would also be used to support *another* exclusionary
narrative, that if colleges were filled with people coming from the lower 88% of high school
students, it would somehow make higher education worse.
As Nixon put it, letting in, quote unquote “less deserving” people, would lead “our
colleges [...] to collapse their educational standards, in the misguided belief that this
would promote “opportunity.”’
[[Conservatives successfully presented inclusion as a trade-off between opportunity and quality,
as if you couldn’t have both. They appealed to the value of excellence to justify the
social reproduction of the elite, accessible only to the luckiest or “most deserving”
of the lower classes.]]
Today, a lot of this discourse is still floating around with a couple new justifications coming
into play. The cost-cutting speech obviously never left. When Bernie proposes his free
or affordable college plan, for example, the first question is always “how much will
this cost?” and never “how come the wealthiest country on earth can’t seem to figure out
something almost every other comparable nation has been able to do for decades?” or “what
about all that extra money going to the pentagon?”
Then there’s the new additions to the excuse roster. For example, the idea that making
college free would hurt America’s ability to twist low-income kids’ arms and make
them go to war, as one Republican congressman flat out admitted. Loan debt is super important
in this regard because now that Dodge has announced they’re discontinuing the charger
and challenger, if student loan debt also goes away, the US military will never get
a new recruit ever again.
[[Jokes aside, we’ve also seen the idea emerge that students are wasting their time
going to college and learning skills they won’t need on the job, as if, one, the purpose
of a college education was job training, not education as the name implies, and two, as
if this was students’ fault and not businesses’ inability, or rather utter incompetence, to
take the most well-trained and well-educated generation in perhaps all of human history
and do something with it.]]
In a similar vein, we’ve seen the emergence of the “just go to vocational school”
discourse become a favorite trope in recent years. You’ve probably heard this as the
“learn how to weld” argument, coming out of Marco Rubio’s mouth
for example:
And just to quickly debunk this: one, welders don’t make more than philosophy majors,
or more than other college grads in general. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics,
the average salary for an experienced welder is $36k a year, while college graduates in
general make around 50-60k right out of college and people who stick to a bachelors in philosophy
make on average about $51k mid-career. [[Only the top 10% of welders makes $63k and above.
It’s not an especially lucrative job. So there’s that. Two, vocational training *is*
college.]] To learn how to weld, you need to take multiple classes over multiple years
after highschool in a variety of different kinds of welding, from basic metal cutting
classes to arc welding, stick welding and gas metal arc welding, not to mention classes
in math, English, and metallurgy as well as classes to learn the symbols and specifications
used in blueprints, most of which happens at a college. [[The divide between “vocational
schools” on the one hand and the supposedly completely different “colleges” on the
other is nothing more than a rhetorical trick trying to make college education seem worthless
in pop culture, which allows governments to slash higher ed budgets. The idea is that
once you associate the phrase “higher education” only with quote unquote “useless” majors,
you’ll see no problem in thinning out their budgets. And just to be clear, welding is
an awesome, useful job. But is it a morally superior educational path, or is it better
paid than an average degree? No.]]
At the end of the day, there's a million different reasons to make college free. It would cost
less than the current model, free millions of Americans from a modern form of debt peonage,
the average sentence of which is 20 years long, and invite thousands of people into
immediately necessary fields like medicine that are too expensive today. [[But more than
all that, it would give more people the freedom to cultivate their interests at a higher level,
gaining skills and knowledge in fields that they genuinely want to learn about, and that’s
worth something too. If you want to live in the “freest country on earth,” people
need to be free to make the innocent decision to learn, without going bankrupt or being
in debt their entire adult lives. It’s that simple.]] After all, this problem is only
two generations old. It wasn’t always like this, and it doesn’t have to be this way
now.
Student loans and debt in general is a pretty fraught topic in the US. Things that the rest
of the world rightly sees as absurd we simply accept as a normal part of life. In order
to solve these problems, we first need to understand them. I try my best to learn and
understand as much as I can so I can share with others, and one way I like to do that
is by listening to audiobooks. I travel a lot for work, so I have plenty of time to
sit on planes and listen to fascinating audiobooks on Audible. One I enjoyed recently, and that
really speaks to these challenges, is Debt: the First 5,000 Years, by the late David Graeber.
It’s an enlightening journey from the ancient past all the way up to the present and our
modern system of debt. If you like to learn as much as I do, getting to pick a free audiobook
every month is pretty nice. I don’t think I can accurately convey how much I love Audible.
I struggle to sit down and read a book, but with Audible I can get through all the titles
I’ve wanted to, all while running errands or commuting or traveling for work. It’s
completely changed how I learn. If you enjoyed this week’s video, I highly recommend you
check out Debt: The First 5000 years on Audible. It’s a fantastic listen. So, if you want
to help support my channel so I can produce more content like this, visit audible.com/secondthought
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