College at Any Cost with Caitlin Zaloom

Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

MS NOW, Chris Hayes

News, Versant Media, Versant, Ms Now, Nbcnews, Why Is This Happening?, The Chris Hayes Podcast, Chris Hayes, Politics, Government, Society & Culture, Msnbc, Withpod

4.6 • 8.9K Ratings

🗓️ 27 August 2019

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Why is it so expensive to go to college? Going to a four-year university and getting a bachelor’s degree is considered the most direct path to the middle class. At the same time, families in the middle class are forced to take extreme and desperate measures to pay for soaring school fees. It’s a broken system that’s taken its toll – we now have more college debt in this country than auto loan or credit card debt. So why is the barrier into the middle class so inaccessible? Caitlin Zaloom, author of "Indebted", tells the stories of families struggling with the financial pressures that come with trying to fund a college education. In this episode, she discusses the psychic toll of this fundamental paradox, both for those who go to college and those who don’t. RELATED READING: Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost by Caitlin Zaloom Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy by Tressie McMillan Cottom Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy by Chris Hayes YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: Thick Descriptions with Tressie McMillan Cottom (Feb 6)

Transcript

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0:00.0	The public universities get austerity and cutbacks and high
0:02.9	to visions, but the government federally is fine subsidizing
0:06.4	rich people to put money into accounts that will grow for 18
0:11.2	years capital gains free and then draw it out so they could
0:14.4	send their kids to Harvard.
0:15.3	I know.
0:15.7	I know.
0:15.7	It's a scandal.
0:16.7	I so messed up.
0:18.0	It's it is incredibly messed up.
0:19.8	Hello, and welcome to Wise is happening with me, your host,
0:26.1	Chris Hayes.
0:28.7	Well, if you're to ask me what's the kind of representative
0:30.2	scandal of our era, like what's a scandal that perfectly
0:32.6	embodies the through lines of America in the year 2019, our
0:36.5	increasingly corrupt meritocracy, which is the topic of my first
0:43.1	book, the yawning chasm between the photos of the top and
0:47.6	everyone at the bottom and the crazy ways in which that inequality
0:51.4	suffuses the entire society with a kind of culture of corruption.
0:57.1	Again, the topic of my first book, you couldn't do any better
1:01.5	than the college admissions scandal, which you probably heard
1:04.5	about, right?
	...

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