Aram Zucker-Scharff

Student debt now exceeds credit card and auto loan debt.

“During Reagan’s two terms as president, dedicated funding for outright grants-in-aid decreased, federal guidelines pushed individual loans, and private bill collectors were brought in to ensure that the hardest kind of debt to escape was whatever you took on for your education. Even more important was the shift in tone and expectation. Public goods became private services, and by the end of the 1980s, the anti-tax, infra-structure-starving, neoliberal Weltanschauung meant that as states cut their budgets, support for higher education was thrown into a cage match with every other necessary public good.”

– Ronald Reagan stuck it to millennials: A college debt history lesson no one tells. Dramatic, awful changes occurred on my generation’s watch — and it amounts to a fiendishly successful conspiracy.

Meet the New Underclass: People With Ph.D.s in Science:

Once upon a time, newly-minted science Ph.D.s would get research jobs at a senior scientist’s laboratory, to train and hone the ideas they would explore at their own labs. But now the supply of post-doctoral students is outpacing demand, creating a new, hyper-educated underclass.

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“The GAO found that 706,000 of households headed by those aged 65 or older have outstanding student debts. That’s just 3 percent of all households, but the debt they hold has ballooned from $2.8 billion in 2005 to about $18.2 billion last year. Some 27 percent of those loans are in default.

If you’re among the 191,000 households that GAO estimates have defaulted, your Social Security benefits can be attached and seized.”

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