Hi, this is Newt. Did you know that you can listen to my Newt's World Podcast on the iHeart app?

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On this episode of Newt's World, the student debt crisis has been building for decades.

And we now have an entire generation of Americans, owing a trillion five hundred billion dollars

in student loan debt, a staggering amount that's nearly equal to the gross domestic product of Canada.

But what caused the student loan debt crisis? The spiraling cost of college tuition?

Easy access to student loans and what role did the federal government play in this?

There's no doubt that the student debt crisis profoundly affects millennials and Gen Z

and the debt they carry has had an impact on their ability to buy homes.

There have been catastrophic consequences that student debt is had on families and the nation's future.

Here to talk more about the student debt crisis, I'm really pleased to welcome my guest, Josh Mitchell.

He is a reporter in the Washington Bureau of the Wall Street Journal writing about the economy

in higher education and he is the author of a new book, The Debt Trap, How Student Loans Became a National Catastrophe.

Josh, thank you for joining me. You've done a great job of both being general

but also being very human and very specific and you open every chapter with a human story.

Are there one or two that you found particularly effective?

The main character of my book is a woman who grew up in Eastern Pennsylvania and she was a

secretary in the 90s and she felt that she really had to go to college. She wanted to be a psychologist

...