Special Issue on Debt (August-September 2011)
The Student Loan Debt Abolition Movement in the United States (1)
George Caffentzis
Debt has had a crushing impact on the lives of those who must take student loans to finance their university education in the US. For tuition fees that have been so notoriously high in private universities now are rising in public universities so quickly they are far out-pacing inflation. Average loan debt per student in the US has been much higher than in Europe (with the exception of Sweden), though recent developments there would indicate that this gap may soon no longer exist (Usher).
We should also take into account the fraudulent way in which the loans have been administered by the banks and the vindictiveness with which those who have been unable to pay back have been pursued by collection agents. The most frustrating aspect of student loan debt being the legally toothless position the debtor is in, because government policy has relentlessly vested all the bargaining power in the hands of the creditors.
But however agonizing the situation of the indebted,
the debt is growing. As of September 2010 total student loan debt amounted
to $850 billion, having just surpassed credit card debt by about $20
billion for the first time. And it is rising at a catastrophic rate,
e.g., by 25% in 2009 to meet the rising cost of tuition and other college
fees. Even the Great Recession has not put an end to this financial
explosion. On the contrary, while credit card debt has leveled off,
student borrowing has continued to grow to cover
the rising costs of living as well as the tuition fees, especially by
unemployed workers who are “going back to school” to get
a “better,” or at least some, job in the future.
Logic, therefore, makes the remission and abolition
of student loan debt a necessary demand for the university student movement,
especially in an era when the need for “an educated work-force”
has become an institutional axiom. However, student loan debt abolition
(for instance) was not a focus
or prominent issue in the student mobilization that peaked in the spring
of 2010, especially in California. This constitutes an impasse for the
movement, since in meeting after meeting it has become clear that refusing
the blackmail of the debt and calling for abolition of tuition fees
are pivotal to every form of struggle on our campuses. Students holding
three jobs to repay (or avoid) loans or taking as
many credits they can fit in their schedules to reduce the budget cuts
and the commercialization of education nor can they engage in self-education
and the creation of “knowledge commons.”
In this contribution to the Edu-factory network’s discussion of debt I think beyond this impasse, asking why an organized debt abolition movement does not exist in the US and what needs to be done to assist its formation.
A first consideration is that the very conditions
that would call for mass student protest against indebtedness have so
far contributed to preempt this possibility. Even before the time to
pay back is upon them, the debt has profound disciplining effect on
students, taylorizing their studies and
undermining the sociality / and politicization that has traditionally
been one of the main benefits of college life (Read).
An even more important consideration is the fact
that student loans are constructed so that students do not pay them
back while they are students. Student loans are time bombs, constructed
to detonate when the debtor is away from the campus and the collectivity
college provides is left behind.
Once we recognize this we can also see that there is a hard-fought struggle
around the student loan debt throughout the US, but (a) it operates
in a non-communal, micro-social, serial way, mainly through default;
(b) it is a struggle that involves subjects other than students, taking
off precisely once
students cease to be students, for only after they leave the campus
do the debt collectors show up at their doorsteps. In other words, while
the visible student movement has not so far made debt abolition its
goal another movement with that goal has been growing to a large extent
underground. One former student after another is rejecting loan payments
through default, but they are not publicly announcing it. “For
fiscal year 2008 the default rate increased to 7.2 percent, compared
with 6.7 percent in 2007 and 5.2 percent in 2006” after a long
period of decline from 1990, when it hit a peak of 22.4%, and 2003,
when it hit a trough of 4.5%. (NB: These somewhat misleading statistics
are calculated according to “cohort” years. For example,
the 2007 cohort default rate is the proportion of federal loan borrowers
who began loan repayments between October 2006 and September 2007, and
who had defaulted on their loans by the end of September 2008. Therefore,
they dramatically underestimate the true default rate) (Lederman).
As typical of “invisible” movements,
statistics fail us in drawing its proportions. We have no estimate,
for instance, of how many have been driven to suicide or how many have
been forced to go into exile due to
their student debts. Nor do we have a measure of the social impact of
the growing de-legitimation of the student debt machine. We can only
speculate about the consequences of disclosures concerning the collusion
between the university administrations (especially in the case of “for
profit” institutions) and the banks, now commonly acknowledged
in the media as well as in congressional investigations. For sure, blogs
and web-groups are forming to share experiences and voice anger about
student loan companies
like the biggest one, the Student Loan Marketing Association (nicknamed
“Sallie Mae”). On Google alone, there are about 9,000 entries
under the rubric “Sallie Mae Sucks,” and another 9,000 under
“Fuck Sallie Mae.” Browsing through the chat rooms, with
their harrowing stories of wrecked lives and mounting frustration against
the operations of Sallie Mae, makes it clear that the potential for
a debt abolition movement is high. So far, however, most attempts that
have been made to give an organizational form to this anger have largely
demanded the application of consumer protection norms to the management
of the debt.
A well-known example is StudentLoanJustice.org
(SLJ.org) that systematically compiles testimonials on the subject,
organized state-bystate, revealing in graphic detail the dread, disgust,
and humiliation
indebtedness generates. These testimonies also reveal why, despite their
anger and despair, debtors hesitate to join in an open debt abolition
movement. As the founder of SLJ.org, Alan Michael Collinge, points out
that there are many obstacles to such course of action: Even now, the
barriers to inciting meaningful political action at the grassroots level
are daunting. For one thing, facing large--often
insurmountable--student debt is a highly personal matter. Many debtors
are too embarrassed or humiliated even to tell their immediate family
members and close friends about their situation, let alone join in a
grassroots effort challenging the injustice of student lending laws.”
(Collinge: 93)
The Kantian imperative that debts ought to be
repaid cost what may is also weighing on the minds of the debtors despite
the fact that the conditions imposed by student loans companies are
often fraudulent and generally unfair. As mentioned, many of the developing
student debtor organizations
refuse to speak of “abolition.” What fuels their indignation
is the arbitrariness and arrogance of the creditors’ management
of the debt, not the debt itself. As the “content author”
of the SallieMaeBeef.com web-site writes:
Allow me to make one thing clear. This site is
not for people who chose not to make their payments. Choosing not to
pay a debt is one’s own fault. Sallie Mae, like many companies,
makes mistakes.
I don’t fault them for that. What matters is how they resolve
the problems. They did a terrible job resolving the mistakes they made
with my account, and I found out that I was far from being the
only person suffering because of THEIR mistakes. I also found that they
allegedly prey on borrowers, trapping people into paying 2 to 3 times
(sometimes significantly more) what they borrowed.
There is simply no excuse for it. (www.SallieMaeBeef.com). The very
choice of the term “Beef” in the title of the organization
suggests a complaint or a private dispute, not a demand or a public
arraignment.
SLJ.org, one of the most publicized student loan protest organizations,
also rejects both individual or collective refusals to pay--witness
what its founder writes of one of SLJ.org’s members, Robert, whose
$35,000 debt became $155,000 through the ploys of the financial company
which held his debt : “like most SLJ.org members, Robert absolutely
agrees that he should pay what he owes, but he simply cannot deal with
a debt of this magnitude” (Collinge: 19).
In other words, prominent anti-student loan debtors organizations re-affirm the principle of the student debt. They believe that the safeguards and regulatory oversight that apply to other consumer loans--mortgages, auto loans, and credit card charges--should be applied to student loans as well, which presently is not the case because of the repeated governmental actions taken to block this option.
*In 1998 Congress made the student loan “the
only type of loan in US history non-dischargeable in bankruptcy”
(Collinge: 14). This means that presently even after filing for bankruptcy
and being
reduced to the status of a pauper, a debtor is still deemed responsible
for payment on student loans, cost what it may, perhaps even facing
a charge of fraud and imprisonment, if some politicians have their ways.
*In 1998 all statutes of limitations for the collection of student loan debt were eliminated.
*Since the beginning of the federal student loan program in 1965, the freedom to change lenders in order to find better terms for a loan has been denied.
Once the commodity approach to education is accepted, the political strategy adopted becomes predictable. According to Collinge, “it is imperative that standard consumer protections be returned to student loans” (Collinge: 20). This means, for a start, that student loans should be made dischargeable in bankruptcy, should have a statute of limitations apply to them, and it should be possible to refinance them with other lenders. These are the demands put forward by SLJ.org since its formation in 2005, supported in varying degrees by a number of liberal politicians like Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Dick Durbin, and Congressmen George Miller and Danny Davis (see the Acknowledgements section of (Collinge: 151)).
Over the last five years this “consumer
protection” strategy has produced significant legislative results
addressing some of the grievances listed above. These include the passage
of three major acts: The College Cost Reduction Act of 2007 (that halves
the interest rate on federally subsidized loans and cuts lender subsidies
and collection fees slightly), The Student Loan Sunshine Act of 2007
(that requires university officials to fully disclose any special arrangements
between them and lending companies),
and in 2010 The Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) (described
below). For all these cautious legislative efforts however, SLJ.org
and similar organizations have not achieved any of their major objectives.
If we add the return to power, as Speaker of the House, of John Boehner,
“by far the largest recipient of campaign contributions from student
loan interests” (like Sallie Mae) and their most aggressive watchdog,
we can conclude that the “consumer protection” approach
to student debt has
reached its limit. Indeed, when Boehner speaks of repealing the Health
Care Bill (whose complete name is the “Health Care and Education
Reconciliation Act”), he certainly alludes also to the education
rider-
SAFRA--hidden in it, as much as to the parts of the bill dealing with
health care.
What then are the prospects for the struggle against student loan indebtedness?
Clearly a premise for the rise of an openly organized student loan debt abolition movement is that the organized campus student movement and the student loan debtor movement off the campuses meet. Indeed, they need each other and will be in crisis as long as they remain separated. On the one side, the student movement activists cannot call for the liberation of education without confronting the debt peonage waiting for them and their fellows, and on the other, the student loan debtors movement must go beyond the limits of its stalemated “consumer protection” approach. The sense that a limit has been reached in this regard is indicated by the enormous interest generated in early 2009 by Robert Applebaum’s Keynesian proposal, “Cancel Student Loan Debt to Stimulate the Economy,” where he called for the government to forgive government student loans and pay back to banks and finance companies the outstanding private student loans (Applebaum).
The combination of an underground struggle involving millions of loan defaulters, intensified by mass unemployment and cuts in social spending, and the exodus of thousands of debtors fleeing the debt collectors hounding them, just as the campuses are becoming again places of mass, open agitation, has set the stage for a student loan debt abolition movement that Edu-factory network, for one, has been calling for.
It is the possibility of this encounter, I believe, that prompted Congress to pass SAFRA that was signed into law by President Obama on March 30, 2010. George Miller, the archetypal East San Francisco Bay liberal, surely had a sense of the political winds that were blowing when he introduced the bill into Congress in July 2009, just as the occupations at the UC campuses of Santa Cruz and Berkeley were being planned and a 32% tuition fee increase was being discussed by UC’s regents. But he was certainly looking as well at the rates of defaulting loans and what they expressed in political terms, for I could not otherwise understand why its buffering attempt would take the form of a student loan debt reduction bill, when the student movement on the campuses was not openly calling for it.
SAFRA is full of diversionary and ameliorating moves in the struggle between debtors and creditors that attempt to cushion the impact of the Crisis on student debtors.
(i) it replaces the private institutions with the federal government as the creditor, by halting loan-guarantees to the banks --a major source of interest revenue for the latter at no risk to themselves. The billions of dollars that will be “saved” would be used to increase scholarships for low-income students (Pell grants);
(ii) it provides for a reduction of debt payments, from 15% to 10% of discretionary income;
(iii) it provides for more debtor-friendly “forgiveness”
conditions (viz., the debt would be “forgiven” for those
working in the “private” sector--if payments were made on
time--in 20 years instead of the
previous 25 years, and in 10 years for those in “public service,”
including teaching and the military).
These more favorable conditions are meant to forestall an increase in
default rates--for if the “crisis” continues and unemployment
rates remain high, the student debt machine is bound to collapse and
will force a “bail out” of student loan debtors similar
to Applebaum’s “Cancel Student Loan Debt to Stimulate the
Economy” proposal. They are also meant to prevent an escalation
of student activism on the campuses and above all to keep the two movements
divided. Whether SAFRA will succeed in doing this is not something we
can foresee at this stage. We can, however, see some steps that appear
necessary to build an abolition movement besides the obvious one of
bringing both movements together in a national student loan abolition
convention.
Building a student loan debt abolition movement
also requires that we reframe the question of the debt itself. A first
step must be a political house cleaning to dispel the smell of sanctity
and rationality surrounding debt repayment regardless of the conditions
in which it has been contracted
and the ability of the debtor to do so. Most important, however, from
the viewpoint of building a movement is to redefine student loans and
debts as involving wage and work issues that go to the heart of the
power relation between workers and capital. Student debt does not arise
from the sphere
of consumption (it is not like a credit card loan or even a mortgage).
To treat student loans as consumer loans (i.e., deferred payment in
exchange for immediate consumption of a desired commodity) is to misrepresent
their content, making invisible their class dimension and the potential
allies in the struggle against them.
Student debt is a work issue in at least three ways:
(i). Schoolwork is work; it is the source of
an enormous amount of new knowledge, wealth and social creativity presumably
benefiting “society” but in reality providing a source of
capital accumulation.
Thus, paying for education is, for students, paying twice, with their
work and with the money they provide.
(ii). A certificate, diploma, or degree of some sort is now being posed as indispensable condition for obtaining employment. Thus the decision to take on a debt cannot be treated as an individual choice similar to the choosing to buy a particular brand of soap. Paying for one’s education then is a toll imposed on workers in exchange for the possibility, not even the certainty, of employment. In this sense, it is a collective wage-cut.
(iii). Student debt is a work-discipline issue
because it represents a way of mortgaging many workers’ future,
of deciding which jobs and wages they will seek and their ability to
resist exploitation and/or to
fight for better conditions (Williams). The overarching goal of capital
with respect to student loan debt is to shift the costs of socially
necessary education to the workers themselves at a time when a world
market for cognitive labor-power is forming and a tremendous competition
is already developing between workers. Employers’ refusal to massively
invest in education in the US is not, in fact, a misreading of its class
interests as theorists like Michael Hardt maintain (Hardt). It is the
result of a clear-cut assessment of the new possibilities opened up
by globalization, starting with the harvesting of educated brains as
well as muscles from every part of the world. Capital’s strategic
use of student loan debts to enforce a harsher work-discipline and to
force workers to take on more of the cost of their reproduction makes
the struggle for debt abolition one that necessarily affects all workers.
Accepting student debt is accepting a class defeat, for it certainly
marks a major set back with respect to the 1970s when education was
still largely financed by the state.
Certainly university teachers (like myself and
many readers) and our unions and associations must take an active role
in the abolition of student loan debt. For we are on the frontline,
but in a compromised position, because we must “save the appearances”
and pretend that for the university, cultural
formation is of the essence, while we know that the student loan money
is the source of much of the university’s budget and that the
future debt peonage of many of our students “pays” our wages
today (Federici). Just as, hopefully, most professors would object to
be paid by a university whose revenue was the product of slave labor,
so too must we object to having our students pay us at the cost of their
post-graduation bondage.
Finally, debt in general is constructed to humiliate
and isolate the debtor (Caffentzis). But demands for its abolition can
be unifying, because it is everybody’s condition in the working
class worldwide. Student loan debt, credit card debt, mortgage debt,
medical debt: across the world, for decades now, every cut in people’s
wages and entitlements has been made in the name of a “debt crisis”
of one sort or another. Debt abolition, therefore, can be the ground
of political re-composition among workers. If this is the
path it takes with respect to student loan debt, the student movement
in the US will experience a decisive turning point and opening out to
many allies beyond the campus.
Afterword: John Boehner’s Revenge: The Debt Ceiling Counter-attack on the Student Movement
In the days leading up to the passing of the debt ceiling agreement
in August 1, 2011 rumors were circulating in Washington and beyond that
the whole government-subsidized student loan program was a focus of
the budget hawks’ annihilating gaze. In the end, the rumors did
their job of terrorizing the creatures in the field, making it easier
to tack on two fundamental changes in the federal government’s
student loan program at the end of the debt ceiling agreement:
First, graduate and professional students would
have to begin paying interest on their loans while they are still studying
instead of, as in the past, six months after graduation. Up until now,
the Federal government has been paying the interest fees while the students
were still in their graduate or professional school programs. With the
new legislation, students can defer payment on the principal and interest
charges until they graduate, but then they must pay for the accrued
interest during
their period of study on top of the principal and future interest charges.
This change would lead to approximately a “savings” of $18.1
billion over a decade.
Second, most of the “savings” (approximately $17 billion) from the above change in the graduate and professional students’ loan program will be directed to an increase in the number of Pell Grants which are meant for low-income undergraduate students.
I call these changes “John Boehner’s
Revenge.” For, as the piece above indicates, Speaker of the House
Boehner is ‘“by far the largest recipient of campaign contributions
from student loan interests” (like Sallie Mae) and their most
aggressive watchdog.’ He has made it his business to restart
the process of privatizing the student loan industry after suffering
a defeat in the passage of the rider to the Health Care bill--the Student
Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA, discussed above)-- which attacked
the foundation of the private student loan sector by taking away the
Federal government’s guarantees of student loans issued by private
lenders. The student loan provisions in the debt ceiling agreement (to
be found in Sections 501-504 of the agreement) provided a perfect place
for Boehner
and his allies to divide the student movement and to slowly pull the
plug on the federal government’s dominance of the student loan
world.
Sections 501-504 of the debt ceiling agreement
clearly were intended to divide the undergraduate from graduate and
professional school students. This was done by reducing funding going
to graduate and professional students through eliminating the Federal
government’s payment of interest charges while these students
are studying (and presumably heading for high wage positions) and “transferring”
these funds to undergraduates from low-income families in the form of
Pell Grants. The rhetoric of monetary “transfer” is clearly
a fiction, since a one dollar reduction in one part of the budget does
not “create” another dollar in another part. Congress could
just as well have increased the number of Pell Grants without changing
graduate and professional school students’ loan conditions. But
the pairing of the defunding of graduate and professional students and
the increased funding of undergraduates was a
clever psychological move that made it difficult for the supporters
of student rights to protest the graduate student provision without
appearing to be demanding a reduction in Pell Grants. On the contrary,
given the logic of austerity, the increase in Pell Grants has been taken
as a positive,
even progressive development.
Another consequence of this “transfer of
funds” from paying interest on student loans to providing outright
grants is the reduction of the financial difference between government
loans and private loans. For if graduate and professional school students
are obliged to pay interest immediately on receiving a government loan,
then one of the great advantages of this kind of loan over private ones
is erased. Indeed, a third legislative change (in Section 503 of the
debt ceiling agreement), though small, is also
indicative of the categorical shift we are witnessing. This provision
eliminates the slight reduction in interest rate on a student loan (.25%),
if the loan installments are paid on-time for one year. Again, though
it might only lead to about a $3 billion “savings” (or payments
by debtors) over ten years, this change attacks the idea that Federal
student loans of the future will remain quite different from the loan
one gets from a private financial institution. It is as if John Boehner
and his ilk are saying: “If the
government is not going to guarantee student loans from banks and other
private sources (a la SAFRA), then we are going to make government-backed
student loans much less attractive.”
What has happened between the passage of SAFRA
in March 30, 2010 and of the student loan provisions of the debt ceiling
agreement in August 1, 2011 that made it possible for John Boehner and
his allies to exact their “sweet revenge” at low political
cost? Of course, there are many factors, but
in the case of the student loan provisions in particular it seems quite
clear. The inability of the student movement in the U.S. to continue
the scale and pace of its mobilization between these two dates has been
not only evident to the participants but also to our enemies. The John
Boehners of the world are not blind to the movement’s difficulty
in launching major initiatives or in sustaining them when they arise
(as in Wisconsin this winter). They also have noted the divisions that
have dogged the student
movement from Los Angeles to New York (some of these divisions have
been chronicled in Reclamations). These same John Boehners are also
cognizant of the fact that the student loan debtors have not organized
to become a major public force in this period, even though student loan
debt
is now the largest category of individual debt in the U.S. The Boehners
of the world are not stupid; they study our movements carefully. On
the basis of their accumulated knowledge of our movements,
it is not surprising then that the debt ceiling debate would be the
occasion for divisive attacks on the student movement (and graduate
and professional students in particular, who have often been in the
forefront of many organizing campaigns) and on the government’s
extended commitment to finance university studies in the future. What
must be surprising will be the response.
George Caffentzis is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern Maine. He is also a founding member of the Midnight Notes Collective.
*****
Bibliography
Applebaum, Robert (2009). Cancel Student Loan Debt to Stimulate the Economy. www.forgivestudentloandebt.com. Accessed December 10, 2010.
Caffentzis, George (2007). Workers Against Debt Slavery and Torture: An Ancient Tale with a Modern Moral. UE Newspaper (July).
Collinge, Alan Michael (2009). The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt in U.S. History--and How We Can Fight Back. Boston: Beacon Press.
Federici, Silvia (2010). "Political Work with Women and as Women in the Present Conditions: Interview with Silvia Federici." Maya Gonzalez and Caitlin Manning. Reclamations. Issue 3 (December). http://www.reclamationsjournal.org/issue03_silvia_federici.htm. Accessed on Dec. 10, 2010
Hardt, Michael (2010). "US education and the Crisis." Liberation (Dec. 2).
Lederman, Doug (2009). "Economy Sinks, Default Rates Rise." Inside Higher Education. September 15. www.insidehigheredu.com/news. Accessed December 10, 2010.
Read, Jason (2009). "University Experience: Neoliberalism Against the Commons." In Towards a Global Autonomous University: Cognitive Labor, The Production of Knowledge, and Exodus from the Education Factory. Edited by the Edu-factory Collective. New York: Autonomedia.
Usher, A. (2005). Global Debt Patterns: An International Comparison of Student Loan Burdens and Repayment Conditions. Toronto, ON: Educational Policy Institute.
Williams, Jeffrey (2009). "The Pedagogy of Debt." In Towards a Global Autonomous University: Cognitive Labor, The Production of Knowledge, and Exodus from the Education Factory. Edited by the Edu-factory Collective. New York: Autonomedia.
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1. This article was written in the winter of 2010-11 and published on the Edu-factory website, www.edu-factory.org. The Afterword, “John Boehner’s Revenge,” was written in early September, 2011, for Reclamations.