Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robertson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs magazine.

My guest today is Josh Mitchell, reporter for the Washington Bureau of the Wall Street Journal, where he writes about the economy and higher education.

And he is the author of the book The Debt Trap, How Student Loans became a National Catastrophe, available from Simon & Schuster.

Nice to be with you. Yeah, sure, thanks.

How student loans became a national catastrophe.

Your book talks a lot about the history of the development of our current situation with student loans.

But before we get to that, I want to start with this question of whether the student loan situation is properly categorized as a catastrophe.

Sometimes you hear a certain rhetoric from politicians that says students who borrow have an

obligation to pay back.

They went to college.

They borrow money.

But a college degree is a valuable investment.

Yes, it looks like a lot of money, but you can't tell much from the fact that there is a

large pool of outstanding debt.

The fact is that these are a privileged group of people who go to college, they get degrees.

Yes, they're on the hook for a few years, but this is not a catastrophe.

So I would like you to just start by explain why you have come to view the situation with student loans as something properly categorized a catastrophe.

Sure. Well, you know, let's just go back to the end of 2019 right before the pandemic.

The economy was actually pretty solid. And even back then, more than one in five students were at least three months behind on their student loans.

That is a very high default rate.

If you compare that to the peak of how much mortgage debt was three months behind at the height of the housing crisis, it's more than twice that.

So just comparing this to the housing crisis, it's more than twice that. So just comparing this to the

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