Is education just a debt sentence?
Intro:
Imagine corporations that intentionally target low-income citizens as ideal customers. Imagine
that these same companies claim to sell tickets to the American dream—gainful employment
and the chance for a middle-class life. Imagine that the fine print on these tickets, once
purchased, reveals them to be little more than debt contracts, profitable to the corporation’s
investors, but disastrous for its customers. And that these corporations receive tens of billions
of dollars in taxpayer subsidies to do this dirty work. Now, know that these corporations
actually exist and are universities. Over the last three decades, the price of a year of college has
increased by more than 1,200 percent. In the past, American higher education has always been
associated with upward mobility, but with student loan debt quadrupling between 2003 and
2013. Much of the American public does not understand the difference between for-profit,
public, and private non-profit institutions of higher learning. All three are concerned with
generating revenue, but only the for-profit model exists primarily to enrich its owners. The
largest of these institutions are often publicly traded, nationally franchised corporations legally
beholden to maximize profit for their shareholders before maximizing education for their
students. While commercial vocational programs have existed since the nineteenth century, for
profit colleges in their current form are a relatively new phenomenon that began to boom with
a series of initial public offerings in the 1990s, followed quickly by deregulation of the sector as
the millennium approached. The Bush administration legislation then weakened government
oversight of such schools, while expanding their access to federal financial aid, making the
industry irresistible to Wall Street investors.