The Debt Trap
Ratings3
Average rating4.7
"The dramatic untold story of the student loan debt crisis in America. In 1981, a new executive at the student loan giant 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.' Far from making college affordable, the student loan system has created a college-industrial complex that has submerged multiple generations in debt. For millions, their college investment turned into a nightmare: 43 million people owe a combined $1.6 trillion in student debt, more than both credit card debt and car loans. How did we get here? Acclaimed Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Mitchell's landmark investigation is the first book to tell the full story of the student loan debt crisis in America. Mitchell shows how the program began in the 1950s, evolved into a grand social experiment in the 1960s, got overtaken by greedy colleges in the 1980s and 1990s, and was unleashed in the 2000s by Sallie Mae, the billion-dollar company that turned student lending into big business. Based on eight years of reporting and hundreds of interviews with the decision-makers who crafted the program, The Debt Trap never loses sight of the countless student victims whose lives have been forever altered by a predatory lending system. Mitchell's defining book shows how the narrative of higher education as a ticket to the American Dream fueled the rise of a rapacious system that one of its original architects called a 'monster'".--From dust jacket.
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Before You Talk About The Student Loan Problem, Read This Book. Here, Mitchell does a phenomenal job of going from the very beginning - before World War I even - and showing just how the student loan problem grew from a well-intentioned idea into the massive debt bomb that we are now struggling with at all levels. Other than one short, couple of pages - if that - section near the end, Mitchell keeps all personal ideas and politics out of the narrative, instead focusing on as objective a reporting of the events as they unfolded as I've ever seen. Indeed, there are only two things that I can think to ding him on at all here, and neither one quite warrants a star reduction:
1) Throughout the narrative, particularly once his timeline gets into the 1990s and 2000s eras, Mitchell doesn't account for the rise of State-sponsored lottery-funded scholarship programs. Though upon a bit of research, it seems that these only exist primarily in the Southeast: Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia. Though I've lived in three of those States and had my college funded by Georgia's HOPE Scholarship - it is at least plausible that anyone living outside of those States, or without close friends or family in them, has never heard of these programs. (And yet even with HOPE, I still managed to amass a $20K student debt load that had ballooned to nearly $40K before I began actively repaying it - upon threat of legal action - largely due to exactly the forces Mitchell describes in this text, but mostly because I was an idiotic 18yo and it was “free money”. Though I'm proud to note that as of this moment, I have less than the various forgiveness amounts that are being bandied about in DC - which Mitchell also covers, in a near up-to-the-minute fashion, even 2 months before publication of this book. An amount that I will pay off before the current suspension of interest - signed by President Trump and extended by President Biden - expires, currently slated for less than two months after this book is published.)
2) The Bibliography is a bit scant at only about 15% of the text, though there is a decent portion of the book - focusing on a singular case study in recurring episodes throughout the narrative - where Mitchell conducted extensive interviews and examinations of the relevant documents personally.
Overall truly an excellent, objective look at the history and many factors that have created today's student loan problem. And as GI Joe once said, “knowing is half the battle”. Very much recommended.
