'Our loan-repayment system is shockingly punishing.”
You’ve seen the frightening student loan statistics, such as the $1.5 trillion in outstanding debt they now represent. And if you’re a parent of a teenager or 20-something, you’ve probably lived them. But Caitlin Zaloom, author of the disturbing new book, “Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost,” says student debt isn’t just taking a financial toll on parents and young adults. She says it’s taking an emotional toll, too.
“Our loan-repayment system is shockingly punishing.” Caitlin Zaloom, author of “Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost” Zaloom’s research for “Indebted” also led her to believe that there are major problems in what she calls the “student finance complex” — the financial aid system run by the U.S. government, colleges and financial institutions.
What would you say is the chief conclusion you came to after talking to all those parents and their kids, and researching the financial aid system? I mean that parents and students are being asked to put down a lot of money on the idea that it will pay off sometime in the future. But they don’t know how it will pay off and can’t see what the future looks like. For the parents, it means putting down money now and drawing from it often — funds that might otherwise go to their retirement. So it’s creating incredible uncertainty for the parents’ futures.
For instance, if there’s a grandparent who relies on the family’s assistance, that responsibility is not part of the calculation.The government draws a tight circle around the nuclear family and not how many Americans live today. Families I interviewed often thought they were being asked to pay far more than their budgets could afford.
You found that the parents and kids you interviewed hadn’t talked together very much about the cost of college and the family’s ability to pay for certain schools. You call this ‘nested silences.’ At the end of the book you say it’s time to negotiate the terms for government programs and the student finance complex. You say we need a new system that supports families and creates more opportunity. How could that be done?
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