Student Debt w/ Ryann Liebenthal, Chenjerai Kumanyika, Mike Pierce

The Dig

Daniel Denvir

News, Politics

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 17 June 2025

⏱️ 149 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Featuring Ryann Liebenthal, Chenjerai Kumanyika, and Mike Pierce on Ryann’s book Burdened: Student Debt and the Making of an American Crisis. Interview by guest host Astra Taylor.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode of The Dig is brought to you by our listeners who support us at patreon.com, and by In These Times, an independent nonprofit magazine dedicated to advancing democracy and economic justice.
0:13.2	The latest issue of In These Times features in-depth profiles of the winners of the inaugural Labor Organizer of the Year Award.
0:23.2	From a longtime UPS Teamster,
0:28.4	who's leading the organizing in Amazon, to a daughter of an incarcerated father, who's worked with formerly incarcerated workers, to win huge victories, even this moment of reaction,
0:34.1	to an anonymous immigrant organizer who helped win legal status for dozens of their coworkers.
0:40.1	In These Times is committed to journalism and analysis that will help workers win.
0:46.5	Dig listeners can get a special subscription offer at In TheseTimes.com slash dig.
0:53.3	Just $15 gets you 10 print issues over the next year. That's In These Times.com
1:01.3	slash DIG.
1:15.5	Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin magazine.
1:20.2	My name is Daniel Denver, and I'm broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island.
1:27.3	Today, student debt in the United States stands at nearly $1.8 trillion. This episode goes deep on how this came to be,
1:31.9	how student loans became the dominant mode of paying for college, and why that led to disaster.
1:38.8	We could have had properly socialized higher education, with funding dedicated directly to institutions, and those institutions
1:47.6	providing free college for all. But policymakers instead constructed a complex system of government
1:54.7	subsidized student lending with ruinous consequences for borrowers and society as a whole.
2:03.4	Today's discussion is with Chendraai Komanyika, Mike Pierce, and Ryan Liebenthal,
2:09.2	interviewed by guest host Astra Taylor.
2:12.2	Together, they trace how this all happened, discussing Leibenthal's book, Burdened,
2:19.7	student debt, and the Making of an American crisis. They go back to the New Deal era's GI Bill, which catalyzed to the federal
2:25.6	government's orientation toward providing financial aid, then mainly grants, to individual students
2:32.4	rather than generously funding public colleges and universities.
	...

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