JUAN GONZALEZ: As the Obama administration continues to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out the nation's banking system, a growing movement is calling on the government to do more to help students struggling to pay for college.
According to the College Board, the average cost of four years at a private college is now a staggering $136,000. Four years at a public university, on average, will set you back $57,000. In order to pay for the rapidly increasing tuitions, students were forced to borrow a total of $85 billion during the last school year, up from $41 billion ten years ago. The average student now leaves college with $20,000 in debt.
Long story short: The Student Loan Marketing Association (Sallie Mae) was established as a government-sponsored enterprise in 1972, and was privatized as part the bipartisan neoliberalism of Clinton's second term, starting in 1997, and concluding with full privatization in 2004, and whopping bonuses all around. It's a perfect example of how a program conceived within the liberal welfare state model was repurposed to serve conservative welfare state ends.
Mass education as a means to social mobility and equality, as well as enhanced autonomy and informed self-government is one of the oldest liberal policy ideas. Thus the origins of student loans, and the eventual creation of Salie Mae in 1972, as part ofthe liberal welfare state project. By dramatically raising the cost of student loans--particularly with added penalties, fees, and intrest rate boosts--students often end up more like indetured servants than free citizens, while producing vst fortunes for the state-sponsed special interests that grow fat off them, the student loan industry has been effectively repurposed to serve conservative welfare state ends.
