Making College Work at Any Cost
Jill on Money with Jill Schlesinger
Audacy
4.6 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 10 October 2019
⏱️ 32 minutes
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Summary
The struggle to pay for college is one of the defining features of middle-class life in America today. At kitchen tables all across the country, parents agonize over whether to burden their children with loans or to sacrifice their own financial security by taking out a second mortgage or draining their retirement savings.
Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost, takes readers into the homes of middle-class families throughout the nation to reveal the hidden consequences of student debt and the ways that financing college has transformed family life.
Caitlin Zaloom gained the confidence of numerous parents and their college-age children, who talked candidly with her about stressful and intensely personal financial matters that are usually kept private.
Throughout the book, Zaloom describes the profound moral conflicts for parents as they try to honor what they see as their highest parental duty, providing their children with opportunity, and shows how parents and students alike are forced to take on enormous debts and gamble on an investment that might not pay off.
What emerges is a troubling portrait of an American middle class fettered by the “student finance complex,” the bewildering labyrinth of government-sponsored institutions, profit-seeking firms, and university offices that collect information on household earnings and assets, assess family needs, and decide who is eligible for aid and who is not.
Indebted breaks through the culture of silence surrounding the student debt crisis, revealing the unspoken costs of sending our kids to college.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, it's Jill Schlesinger. On this episode of Jill on Money, |
| 0:06.8 | we are exploring why college funding makes us so crazy. |
| 0:11.3 | We need a system for lending which doesn't make young adults vulnerable in their most vulnerable |
| 0:20.5 | years. Welcome to the Jill on Money Podcast. |
| 0:24.0 | We are presented by Marcus by Goldman Sachs. |
| 0:27.0 | Well, it's October, and you know what that means? |
| 0:29.0 | It's FAFSA month, the free application for federal student aid. |
| 0:36.4 | And that is going to cause a lot of anxiety for many of you listening and to understand why you feel the way you do, we have an important |
| 0:46.4 | guest for the program today. Her name is Caitlin Zalum. Her book is |
| 0:50.9 | called Inded How Families May may college work at any cost and I will tell you that after |
| 0:56.7 | this interview and reading her book I absolutely shifted my mindset about why people make themselves crazy about college |
| 1:05.8 | funding. So here's our interview with Caitlin Zaloom. You're listening to Jill |
| 1:11.8 | on money with Jill Schlesinger. |
| 1:13.8 | Caitlin, we start the program with a very simple question. |
| 1:17.4 | What is the best financial or career decision you have ever made? |
| 1:22.0 | That is a really... career decision you have ever made? |
| 1:22.8 | That is a really great question. |
| 1:27.3 | I've been academic and a scholar for a long time. The most interesting moment in my career was actually |
| 1:36.0 | taking a job when I was in college as a teaching assistant at the Borough of |
| 1:41.3 | Manhattan Community College. |
| 1:42.8 | B. MCC, I took options theory there. |
| 1:45.8 | When I was a trader on the commodities exchange. |
... |
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