Educational Debt
Stop laying financial responsibility for the maintenance of an advanced society on teens and young adults.
“You won’t be carrying a calculator in your pocket all the time.”
My elementary school teachers turned out to be wrong about that, but I still appreciate having memorized the Times Tables and learned long division and algebra. They actually save time on simple calculations, in addition to being an essential backup to when I don’t have my phone in my pocket.
Mass, popular numeracy and literacy have been made possible through increasing social complexity—notably through divisions of labor. As we have specialized trades and skills, practitioners have advanced their fields further than any generalist could. This goes to mathematics and engineering, to philosophy and law, and to medicine and computer programming. Our advanced knowledge and technologies rest upon the arcane and analogue, and preserving them is essential, social insurance.
While capitalism demands constantly reinventing technologies for the sake of advancing profit, and there is little demand remaining for buggy whip manufacturers in an automotive society, the foundational knowledge of our intellectual disciplines carry through. The wheel, the carriage, the source of energy, and how to harness it change by design, but the physics and engineering are bound to the material world.
No matter how “advanced” a technology or technique, the realm in which it operates is a mundane constant. Without comprehension of the qualities of that constant, material world, and how to progress from that foundation to the vanguard of knowledge, we become increasingly dependent on technologies that we, ourselves, do not understand.
We recognize this when we note the stark generational differences among those who have lived in a fully analogue world, and those who are living in the growing simulacrum, made possible by computers. Our analogue past itself marked advances in technology, with electronic communications (telegraph, telephone, television) and material, hard copies of culture (books, film, records). There was as much of a cultural and technological gap between pre-electronic society and an electrified society as there is between an analogue society and a digital one. The main difference being the amount of time the transition took and how much lag was produced.
As a species, we have been rendered alienated and thus “lazy.” Convenience—reducing the amount of time between desire and its fulfillment—is becoming a general demand on par with labor itself. People routinely show a willingness to pay more for goods or services when they are delivered immediately, as opposed to having to wait hours, days, or weeks. This is due more to their own time constraint, enforced by labor obligations, than it is due to immediate needs.
What is lost in the increasing complexity of social life and our growing dependence on technology is the time and discipline needed to ensure that complexity can be maintained. There is considerable talk of how artificial intelligence will be able to cover a wide range of word-workers’ jobs (attorneys, writers, teachers, managers), doing to that class what robotics did to heavy industrial labor.
The risk we run, however, is that by social (expanding illiteracy) or natural (solar flares) causes, our present quality of life will be rapidly lost, and we will not have the means to re-create it.
Without a method of educating future generations—and the time it takes for human beings to learn languages, maths, philosophies, and sciences—society will not be able to reproduce itself as it was. It will appear as societal breakdown, but the truth is the decay will be institutional first. We will make education a scarce resource, rather than treat it as a foundation for a complex society. We already can see this happening in the United States, by the way we have individualized the burden of social reproduction, with some seeking to fully privatize and individualize education, from Kindergarten onward.
The problem of educational (or “student”) debt is multi-fold. I have seen people taking sides on an issue that truly is central to how we operate as a nation and the future of our economy. Educational debt is a structural and institutional problem, and to fix it we not only have to address the oncoming financial and elder care crises, but we are going to have to alter the ways in which we go about financing education.
First, Ronald Reagan disqualified educational debt from bankruptcy protections, meaning unlike a mortgage, a car loan, or medical expenses, when someone lacks enough income, they carry the debt and the interest and penalties for the rest of their lives. If/when they retire, they will not collect their full Social Security because the federal government will take it as payment of the principle, interest, and penalties. This is going to lead to a lot of elders in deep trouble, over the next 30 years.
Second, the federal government made much more money available for student loans and allowed anyone enrolled in an accredited school to take on as much debt as the schools demanded. More available cash sent tuition and fees skyrocketing, as universities used the revenue for infrastructure and new administrator levels, to become more appealing to those students the schools were competing for.
Third, wages stagnated in the early 1980’s and still have not approached half of what they were, when wage increases matched productivity increases. That is to say, a college graduate in 2015 would earn effectively half the value that someone who graduated in 1975 was able to earn at their respective first jobs. Recall the 1975 graduate was paying much less for their education, and then earning much more after they graduated.
Fourth, 40% of people who have educational debt never earned the degree they took the debt out for, and they are no longer enrolled in school. Before you look to call them “failures” note that about 40% of people who enrolled in higher education prior to the debt balloon also did not earn a degree. So they have the debt, but not the degree that would give them a better chance at a higher-paying job.
Fifth, we have seen an entire generation (Millennial’s) who are not buying houses (another thing that ballooned in cost since 1980) or having kids a the rates prior ones did. The number one reason: They cannot afford to. Again, this is not due to personal failing on the part of the 52% of people 25 - 35 years old in the U.S. who were living with their parents, in 2020.
Sixth, that lack of generational wealth is going to send the housing market into decline, as people will not be able to afford to buy houses at present market rates. Fewer people will buy cars, or take on any form of long-term payments. This will hurt economic growth.
Targeting educational debt with an immediate, viable assistance program and people will be able to afford to spend $400 - $800 a month on something other than a loan payment, which never goes back into their local economy. Then we need to make it just like all other debts—open to bankruptcy, which is bad enough for those who go through it. There is no need to render people homeless when they can no longer work for money, and they cannot collect Social Security.
We created this dysfunction and we are capable of repairing it, but left unaddressed, it will cripple us in the coming decades.