Burdened: Student Debt and the Making of an American Crisis

A sweeping, urgent investigation of the student loan debt crisis in America, revealing the corrupt systems, bad actors, and rotten policies that have led to a $1.7 trillion-dollar burden to an entire generation.

Student debt has become a quintessentially American crisis. College costs more than ever and is worth less. Tuition at public colleges has soared by almost 400 percent in the past 50 years. Over the same period, wages have increased only 115 percent, and student debt has grown from virtually nothing to $1.7 trillion (tripling in just the past 15 years), second only to mortgages.

Skyrocketing student debt burdens are leading an entire generation of students to delay or avoid reaching the traditional milestones of adulthood: they are delaying buying homes, getting married, starting families, and saving for retirement. The crisis hits women harder and for Black women, even worse. While women graduate with 15 percent more debt than men on average, for Black women, it's double. Because of racial wealth and income gaps--the ongoing legacies of centuries of white-supremacist policies--Black borrowers are hit hardest of all.

Ryann Liebenthal's OVERDUE tells the maddening story of how, over the past century, the power plays of legislators and presidents, the commodification of high ed, the predatory practices of for-profit colleges, and the privatization of lending has created today's untenable student debt lava pit.

As the notion of student debt cancellation continues to percolate into the political mainstream, Liebenthal untangles the mess by offering a deeply reported, sweeping narrative of the people, institutions, and ideological underpinnings of our broken system. By tracing the long tail of a failed system, Liebenthal boldly offers a way out.