Student Loans Are Culture
Culture Study Podcast
Anne Helen Petersen
4.6 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 13 March 2024
⏱️ 53 minutes
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Summary
What does it mean to think of student loans as culture? First off, it means that we can think of them as something that’s changeable. Because as much as we’ve come to think of massive piles of debt as “just the way it is” for a broad swath of people (and more and more every year), there’s nothing inevitable about student loans. Our status quo doesn’t have to be saddling young adults (and/or their parents, and/or their grandparents) with albatrosses of debt, simply to obtain the credentials that (at least theoretically) put someone on track to financial security. But if significant student debt isn’t our status quo… what could be?
Dominique Baker is one of my favorite thinkers on higher ed in general and the topic of student loans in particular — and we’re answering all your student-loan-culture questions, from “why can’t endowments just pay for all of this” to “how do I convince my beloved partner that it’s okay for us to share their student loan obligations?”
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Transcript
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| 0:56.3 | I think that's really curious because it makes me think that student loans have become |
| 1:02.5 | such a part of the fabric, I guess, of our world and society that we can think that it's not |
| 1:09.5 | culture, that it's not some sort of expression of |
| 1:12.7 | choices that we've made about our society and what we value and how it works. That is |
| 1:19.2 | mind-boggling to me. Yeah, well, I think it's one of those things that's kind of like |
| 1:23.8 | mortgages aren't ideological, right? Like that, which, you know, the thing about ideology |
| 1:30.1 | is that it erases itself as an ideology. Like, it just sets itself up as the way things are, |
| 1:36.8 | instead of the way things are that we should interrogate how they came to be that way. And so student |
| 1:43.4 | loans have almost normalized as, |
| 1:46.2 | oh, of course people graduate with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. That's just how |
... |
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