Guaranteeing Banker Profits and Student Debts: The Public Policies behind the US Student Loan Crisis
Tuesday, February 13, 2024 from 2:30 pm to 4:30 pm
- In-person event
- 1524 , Dunton Tower , Carleton University
- 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6
Guaranteeing Banker Profits and Student Debts: The Public Policies behind the US Student Loan Crisis
Date: February 13, 2024
Time: 2:30 p.m.
Location: Dunton Tower 1524
Why is student debt so out of control in the US? Canada and the US started experimenting with student loans at the same time. Those financial products have become a burden in both countries but Americans are drowning in far more debt than Canadians. Those outcomes reflect both problems intrinsic to student loans and key differences in Canadian and US policymaking.US laws and political norms shaped the policy choices that US politicians made to turn a small, limited tuition-assistance program into a sizable financial sector whose profitability the US federal government has and continues to guarantee.
Elizabeth Tandy Shermer is the 2023-2024 Fulbright Canada Distinguished Chair in Public Affairs in North America at Carleton University. She is a professor of history focusing on the 20th and 21st century US. Her research on politics, public policy, capitalism, and labor has appeared in op-eds, academic articles, and scholarly books, including Sunbelt Capitalism (2013) and Indentured Students (2021). She is currently finishing a monograph on the public/private character of American higher education, tentatively titled, The Business of Education as well as an edited collection on work, capitalism, and democracy in the 20th-Century US.
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