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Podcast: New Books in Public Policy
Episode: Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, "Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in College Debt" (Harvard UP, 2021)
Description: It didn't always take thirty years to pay off the cost of a bachelor's degree. In Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in College Debt (Harvard UP, 2021), Elizabeth Tandy Shermer untangles the history that brought us here and discovers that the story of skyrocketing college debt is not merely one of good intentions gone wrong. In fact, the federal student loan program was never supposed to make college affordable.The earliest federal proposals for college affordability sought to replace tuition with taxpayer funding of institutions. But Southern whites feared that lower costs would unde...