Burdened: Student Debt and the Making of an American Crisis

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. (Sept.)