Those who have taken on debt are increasingly unable to pay it off many haven’t even received diplomas. Eroding union density, declining wages, and skyrocketing tuition have all made college less a path to high-paying jobs than an escape hatch from the worst-paying ones. Education would be an incidental benefit.īut the surge of aging debtors calls into question the premise of education for human capital. Lending money for people to be educated was not only a sound investment-borrowers were sure to get high-paying jobs that would allow them to repay the loan-but smart macroeconomics: more educated people would increase the nation’s G.D.P. Under the vision of the free-market economist Milton Friedman, student loans emerged in the nineteen-fifties as an outgrowth of “human capital” theory, which posits the self as, above all, a unit of investment.
Perhaps no form of credit better embodies the myth of a future, richer self than student loans. But, in an era of declining wages and rising debt, Americans are not aging out of their student loans-they are aging into them.Ĭredit supposes that which we cannot afford today will be able to be paid back by tomorrow’s wealthier self-a self who is wealthier because of riches leveraged by these debts. Perhaps because policymakers have considered student debt as the burden of upwardly mobile young people, inaction has seemed a reasonable response, as if time itself will solve the problem. Between 20, student-loan balances for borrowers over fifty increased by five hundred and twelve per cent. Of the forty-five million Americans who hold student debt, one in five are over fifty years old. She is ninety-one years old.Īmericans aged sixty-two and older are the fastest-growing demographic of student borrowers. Today, she owes $329,309.69 in student debt. Betty Ann had borrowed twenty-nine thousand dollars in federal loans.
Her white male classmates would slyly elbow her books off the long library tables, and once, while standing at her locker, a classmate waved a ten-thousand-dollar tuition check, signed by his father, in her face. As a middle-aged Black woman, she wasn’t exactly the typical N.Y.U. In 1983, at the age of fifty-two, Betty Ann enrolled in New York University’s law school. “I thought the only way that I could change things was to have a higher degree,” she told me. But she grew increasingly frustrated by the marks of educational inequity-moldy lunches, low-grade reading materials-that plagued her classrooms. In the next few decades, she worked as a public-school teacher in Pittsburgh and Harlem, in addition to raising two children as a single mother. Although her mother had no money, Betty Ann was a strong student and earned enough scholarships to receive a bachelor’s and master’s degree in education. The family made good on both: as ward chairwoman, Robert’s wife maintained the family home as a community backbone, and Betty Ann, who asked that she and her family members be identified by first name only, grew up with a steady stream of neighbors flowing through the house. He had two dying wishes: for his wife to take over his role as a Democratic ward chairperson, and for Betty Ann and her sisters to go to college. Thereafter, he became a devoted Democrat and jumped into local politics with fervor until he fell ill, five years later. A few weeks later, when Robert cast his ballot for F.D.R., he wept, aghast to vote against the party of Lincoln. Much to his distress, his wife had taken to standing in relief lines in order to feed Betty Ann and her sisters. Hard times had meant he had started to pay the reporters of Pittsburgh’s Black newspaper, which he ran, out of his own pocket. Still, he felt compelled by F.D.R.’s message. Robert was a dyed-in-the-wool Republican-his grandfather, an enslaved man from Virginia, had been emancipated by President Abraham Lincoln. In the back of the park, a two-year-old Black girl named Betty Ann sat on the shoulders of her father, Robert, as he strained to point out the man he was sure would become President. “Sometime, somewhere in this campaign, I have got to talk dollars and cents, and it’s a terrible thing to ask you people to listen for forty-five minutes to the story of the federal budget, but I am going to ask you do it,” he told the crowd. On a warm October evening, in 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt stood in a baseball field in Pittsburgh, delivering an impassioned speech about passion’s improbable subject: the federal budget.