The Destabilizing Politics of Student Debt

Abstract

This Article provides an account of how student loans came to stabilize federal higher education politics and how, over time, they eroded their own stabilizing qualities. It argues that student loans created a sort of anti-politics that sustained itself through ideological ambiguity, through offloading and hiding budgetary impact, and through a legislative process controlled by industry whose revenues depended on these loans. This anti-politics became unsustainable as the costs of student loans became harder to hide, as the corruption of insider politics began to be uncovered, and as burdened student debtors began to assert themselves politically. As each of these dynamics took root, the politics of student debt began to divide more deeply on ideological lines, which undermined stabilization via depoliticization. It did so at the same time that left and right moved farther apart on the politics of higher education: a debt-skeptical left wing gained power in the Democratic caucus and right wing insurgents began to turn against the very idea of independent and diverse institutions of higher education.

Federal higher education policy is now being torn apart. It will require reconstruction one way or another. The hope motivating this Article is that revisiting the compromises that stabilized it before will provide us a way to think about how it might be stabilized again, under quite different circumstances.

Keywords: student debt, higher education, student loans, consumer finance, law and political economy, policy feedback, economic sociology