I went from TA at Duke to teaching at two state schools. In the background of studying student debt and potential results of forgiveness, I am thinking of my students who are working full time and going to school full time. https://twitter.com/williamrblack/status/1328518211202142208

Who load more and more onto themselves but really they’re carrying the weight of student debt. Many of them express (even PRE pandemic) feelings of isolation because they are always at work, commuting, at class or studying.

Because they have relatively few contacts they often don’t know other people are experiencing the same as them and that it’s not their individual fault.

Like the OP noted, even my top students,well rounded leaders, often graduate into jobs that don’t require a BA degree and pay $10/hr. This is not about major choice. This is about students taking the brunt of what @tressiemcphd called a “shitty labor market” (again, PRE pandemic)

And they did so because the government whittled down social policies that had created this unique moment of a strong middle class with capacity to build wealth, save for retirement, send their kids to college.

What is left is federal student loans, a do it yourself approach to social provision. And meanwhile many of our students are going to college not even for social mobility, but for the hope of getting to work just ONE full time job.

The cohort of people currently making most distributional decisions also benefitted most from the era when we did have a strong safety net, worker protections and wealth-building mechanisms like low-cost mortgages (primarily reserved for white people in practice...)

But they individualized these outcomes as the effect of their “hard work,” not work+social policy. Then they spent the last four decades sitting on their wealth and using levers of tax policy, neighborhood segregation, etc. to continue to hoard it.

our public funding model for higher ed, funding based on the student rather than public institutions, contributes to a narrative about individuals and their good or bad choices. A choice can always be retroactively framed as “shouldn’t have taken out all that DEBT”

It works as a system because students believe the lie that this is somehow their fault, and our collective expectations of basic social provision, or even a minimum wage that occasionally goes up, are at the FLOOR.