America’s Student-Debt Crisis Was Born in the 1600s
Needy students were forced into loans at the dawn of the Ivy League. A few centuries later, Lyndon B. Johnson poured lighter fluid on the problem.
The price of admission.
Photographer: Yunghi Kim/The Boston Globe via Getty ImagesPresidential candidates have been busy coming up with ways to deal with the student-loan crisis. And it is a crisis: Recent figures show that nearly 45 million people in the U.S. have more than $1.5 trillion in outstanding student loans, with default rates hitting double digits.
How did borrowing become the dominant way to finance a college education? The answer to that question lies deep in the nation’s history. What began as a well-intentioned, private campaign to help needy college students has metastasized into something that now burdens the very people it was meant to help.