The Debt Trap
How Student Loans Became a National Catastrophe
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4.3 • 7 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
AN NPR AND NEW YORK POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
From acclaimed Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Mitchell, the “devastating account” (The Wall Street Journal) of student debt in America.
In 1981, a new executive at Sallie Mae took home the company’s financial documents to review. “You’ve got to be shitting me,” he later told the company’s CEO. “This place is a gold mine.”
Over the next four decades, the student loan industry that Sallie Mae and Congress created blew up into a crisis that would submerge a generation of Americans into $1.5 trillion in student debt. In The Debt Trap, Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Mitchell tells the “vivid and compelling” (Chicago Tribune) untold story of the scandals, scams, predatory actors, and government malpractice that have created the behemoth that one of its original architects called a “monster.”
As he charts the “jaw-dropping” (Jeffrey Selingo, New York Times bestselling author of Who Gets in and Why) seventy-year history of student debt in America, Mitchell never loses sight of the countless student victims ensnared by an exploitative system that depends on their debt. Mitchell also draws alarming parallels to the housing crisis in the late 2000s, showing the catastrophic consequences student debt has had on families and the nation’s future. Mitchell’s character-driven narrative is “necessary reading” (The New York Times) for anyone wanting to understand the central economic issue of our day.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The $1.6 trillion Americans owe in student loans is greater than the size of the Canadian economy, notes Wall Street Journal reporter Mitchell in this meticulous, eye-opening history of the student debt crisis. Though the G.I. Bill effectively paid for mass higher education in the years after WWII, Congress rejected Harry Truman's attempt to make the first two years of college free. Instead, the U.S. government assumed all the risk of student loans, while banks and colleges profited. Universities raised tuition costs because consumers could simply borrow more to pay for it, and banks extended government-guaranteed loans to students who had little hope of paying them back. Mitchell poignantly recounts the stories of borrowers including Lisa (no last name given), a 54-year-old single mother of two who took out loans to pay for her undergraduate and graduate degrees and now is on the hook for $96,820, on top of dealing with breast cancer and anxieties over her daughter's student debt. Mitchell masterfully explains how America got itself into this debacle, though readers will wish for a more robust inquiry into the solutions he supports, which include forgiving interest on student loans, making community college "truly free," and government funding for apprenticeship programs. Still, this is an immersive and illuminating introduction to a hot-button issue.
