student loans

The other side of student debt: Salaries of some private college presidents according to the Chronicle of Higher Education (source). These numbers are deceptive.

Radical — a person who advocates thorough or complete political or social reform; a member of a political party or part of a party pursuing such aims.
• synonyms: revolutionary · progressive · reformer · revisionist · militant ·
• chemistry: a group of atoms behaving as a unit in a number of compounds.
See also free radical.
• the root or base form of a word.
• mathematics: a quantity forming or expressed as the root of another.

For families under age 35, growth of student debt outstrips by far the growth of any other debt source, including mortgage and credit card debt (source).by Gaius PubliusIn America today, 44 million people collectively carry $1.4 trillion in student debt.

On Wednesday we talked about a new publication, The Macroeconomic Effects of Student Debt Cancellation, by Stephanie Kelton, Scott Fullwiler, Catherine Ruetschin and Marshall Steinbaum. Three progressive candidates-- Jenny Marshall (Winston-Salem and much of the Piedmont in northwest North Carolina), David Gill (central Illinois) and Antoinette Sedillo Lopez (Albuquerque)-- explained why they back the concept of student debt cancellation.

The Levy Economics Institute-- a nonpartisan public policy think tank at Bard College-- just published The Macroeconomic Effects of Student Debt Cancellation by Stephanie Kelton, Scott Fullwiler, Catherine Ruetschin and Marshall Steinbaum. Sound familiar?

This is the second in a two-part article on the debt burden America’s students face. Read Part 1 here.

Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and inhuman.
— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Second National Convention of the Medical Committee for Human Rights, Chicago, March 25, 1966.

Higher education has been financialized, transformed from a public service into a lucrative cash cow for private investors.
The advantages of slavery by debt over “chattel” slavery – ownership of humans as a property right – were set out in an infamous document called the Hazard Circular, reportedly circulated by British banking interests among their American banking counterparts during the American Civil War. It read in part:

One year ago, the news was awash with Billy Willson, a 4.0 GPA student from Kansas State University who decided to drop out of university after his first semester with this Facebook message: “YOU ARE BEING SCAMMED. You may not see it today or tomorrow, but you will see it some day.”  His post is still being shared and there are close to 9,000 comments mounting on this thread.

Living on the canals and rivers of London for many years, I came within close quarters of some of that city’s most desperate inhabitants, namely those who live on narrowboats because living in London has, in recent years, become horrifically expensive and beyond the means of most, even when flat sharing.