What @louise_seamster does in our conversation about student loan debt is an exemplar of public intellectualism and sociology at work. She connects observations about how tired her students are to macro wealth inequality.
https://twitter.com/nytopinion/status/1455901852717961218
Why are so many traditional aged students in fairly selective traditional 4 year colleges so exhausted? They are taking course overloads to double major and add a certificate or three to an internship and business incubator and a job.
Why are they doing this opportunity hoarding? Because the pressure of indebtedness shifts their relationship to time and achievement. They are trying to individually turn their debt into “good” debt, or the kind that will pay off.
That experience of debt is not an individual experience. But the nature of debt is that it feels like it is only happening to you. Louise then pulls us out to the institutional context of the debt: how universities are funded and engage in their own opportunity hoarding.
She links this process of institutions using debt to other domains - for housing to governance - and takes us to a very big idea: how debt has replaced the responsibility of the state to us, its citizens. We now “earn” our citizenship through taking on debt.
She moves elegantly from experience to analysis, micro to macro and keeps the thread the entire time: student loan debt is a public problem. If we do this work really well, this is what it can look like.
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