#csa 2014

Sharing with you today a photo from the CSA2014, for no reason ... ;) 

There is a formative tension throughout debt scholarship with which I begin: that tension lies between the argument – or realization, depending on where you are in time – that crisis is manufactured and confronting the lived experiences of crisis. In other words, while there are many theoretical and conceptual gains from locating the man behind the curtain there is still the palpable drudgery for those of us not profiting from it to survive the crisis. In thinking about social construction and its reality, Bruno Latour (2003) suggests that “the more constructed the more real,” which Janet Roitman (2014) adopts and I use here. Taking this adage quite literally, I argue that the more manufactured the crisis becomes, the more real are its effects. The more the mythos of crisis, limits, and scarcity are enacted materially and discursively the more we live the crisis. Importantly, the more real the crisis becomes – whether as a site of theoretical inquiry or catalyst for social change, or both – the more crisis is re-invoked and the more normative it becomes.

This paper contextualizes scarcity and limited resources as rhetorical tools within the neoliberalization of higher education. Under the specter of crisis, educational institutions offload costs of once public services onto an increasingly indebted and immobile citizenship. What follows is an exploration of how the logic of limited resources, scarcity, and crisis promotes individual behaviors that solidify economic disparity and maximize the capitalist accumulation of wealth. Bemoaning the loss of state and federal funding, colleges have taken every opportunity to ratchet up tuition and fees, thus generating revenue (Cantwell) but not high quality undergraduate education (Samuels, 2013). Out of fear of impoverishment and social immobility, individuals are persuaded to attend college, taking on massive student debt (Meister, 2011). But, with or without a degree, graduates find themselves overwhelmed by debt, becoming living embodiments of scarce resources as they struggle to survive in conditions designed to dishearten and disenfranchise.

For the sake of this paper I pause briefly to define three terms used throughout this presentation. One: Indebtedness is a social, cultural, and fiscal relationship that widely canvasses economic, political, and affective ecologies. This broadly based definition intends to wed the abstract workings of neoliberal capitalism with the not so abstract people they effect. Two: Neoliberalism is a political, economic, and cultural ideological apparatus that promotes the tenants of individual responsibility, privatization, the upward distribution of wealth, and a free and unrestricted market. And three: crisis. We must ask, what is crisis? What does it mean to be in crisis? Quoting Eric Cazdyn’s The Already Dead, “Crisis is not what happens when we go wrong; crisis is what happens when we go right.” Through example, Cazdyn argues that in capitalism: “crisis is not what happens when capitalism goes wrong, but when it goes right” (2012, 2).

What I suggest here is that through the manufacturing of crises, both materially and discursively, indebtedness as a logic, as a state of being, is produced thus engendering ongoing generations of debtors, whose labor, lives, and loves are extracted ad infinitum. Higher education, I show, by adopting the promise of social mobility and the American Dream, presents itself as an alternative to crisis, thus enticing and shackling people to the crisis economy through student debt. In this way I suggest that the crises within higher education of funding, costs, and mounting debt burdens are not where something went wrong, but where everything went right.

The rest of this paper is organized in two parts followed by a discussion and conclusion. First I will locate through examples how crises have been produced within higher education institutions but also how institutions  use crisis to recruit students. Second I show through statistics and interviews how recent graduates and student debtors are living in crisis every day, becoming yet another embodiment of capitalist extraction. In my discussion I argue that more important than the ongoing questions of access, affordability, and quality is the culpability of higher education institutions in debt production. That is, while it is important that institutions exist to promote intellectual development to any and all that desire it, it is paramount that we separate the pursuit of knowledge from the machinery of debt production.

Crisis in Higher Education; Out of Crisis through Higher Education

Endemic to higher education scholarship and popular discourse is the argument that higher education is in crisis: arguably, these crises in could have been avoided or tempered. But as these crises are the  logical outcome of capitalist machinations working well and NOT the unfortunate consequence of mismanagement and error, there is nothing to fix.  

Case in point, institutions of higher education are verklempt – how do you do more with less resources? In the last few decades there has been a steady decline in educational spending at the state and federal level. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities found that most states are funding schools less than before the recession. As a result, institutions have deemed it necessary to raise tuition and fees, if not an actual opportunity to do so. Within the last decade alone tuition and fees have risen 5.2 percent above inflation every year. While there are a number of problems with the Bennett Hypothesis that I address in my dissertation, for the sake of brevity I present it here. It posits that as the federal government extends financial aid to students, institutions can increase costs and absorb that revenue (Frederick, Schmidt, Davis, 2012). Against the backdrop of neoliberal financialization, funding education through loans is sensible, and indeed profitable: in April the Congressional Budget Office reported that the federal government would realize profits of $129 billion over the next decade. And we see this play out in the data: since the 1990s there has been a noticeable inversion in the types of financial aid. Aid as loans exceeds financial aid as grants and it has outpaced grants every year since (College Board). Should the Bennett Hypothesis be valid, then a simple solution could be to place tuition and fee caps on institutions that accept federal funding. As it is now, tuition and fees increases are outpacing financial aid. And as educational funding decreases the student loan crisis worsens. While not a cure-all, if educational spending had been a fiscal priority and came with stronger government interventions into the college cost problem, today’s ongoing crisis could have been avoided.

Out of Higher Education and into Crisis

The threat of crisis looms large everyday; institutions in and outside of higher education use the conceptual threat of economic crisis to promote a college degree as the definitive solution to social immobility. Robert Meister (2011) writes in “Debt and Taxes” that students and guardians see higher education as an insurance against poverty, as a ticket to the top. But he argues that no one except the top one percent has made any income gains, and a post secondary education is not the asset it is thought to be. But universities, both public and private, assume that when students buy a degree they are not paying merely for the cost of an instructional service; they are also purchasing a financial asset—a kind of insurance against a rising income gap between graduates and non-graduates. (Meister, 2012, 129). And yet, higher education studies, news, and television personalities all contribute to the logic that college is still worth it thus producing a discursively rich landscape in which the mechanisms of debt production are obscured or flat out ignored. Everywhere we are surrounded by crisis: the STEM crisis wherein we do not have enough domestic STEM graduates. It is more accurate that there are not enough STEM jobs to place those STEM graduates. There is the crisis in long-term unemployment rates and the crisis of stagnant wages concomitant with record profitability amidst the ongoing housing crisis and the American people deserve to know what really happened in Benghazi! That’s a joke, albeit not a very funny one.

All of this is quite excessive and we can borrow a line from Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, which borrows a line from Milton Friedman. The shock doctrine, as Klein calls it, is the prevailing capitalist strategy of the last forty years, wherein “only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop al­ternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politi­cally impossible becomes politically inevitable” (2009, 6).

Amidst all of this shock and awe is the relative constant: obtaining a higher education degree is a smart and worthwhile investment, and that despite its ups and downs, you should still go. And while each and every moment crisis is invoked to exact a predictable and profitable consumer behavior - and the consequent library of scholarship and critique - it is higher education’s role in debt production that I emphasize here.

To elaborate on this point I juxtapose the findings from a recent Pew report titled with a quote from a viral photo first posted in November 2011. In the Pew Social Trends Report, “The Rising Cost of Not Going to College” (2014) the researchers’ overview is as follows: On virtually every measure of economic well-being and career attainment… young college graduates are outperforming their peers with less education” (3). What is most concerning is that the economic disparity between college graduates and their peers with less education has never been greater (3). According to Pew, and most of the sources that I have cited earlier, nearly every aspect of your life will be vastly improved if you just go to college. Rather address why economic disparity is on the steady incline the scholarship advocates going to college without significant reflection on debt.

Against this constructed reality is the lived reality of those students who went to college. In November 2011 a woman posted a photo on the Occupy Student Debt  blog that reads, “student loan paid faithfully for 23 years; borrowed: $26,400. Paid back: $32,700. Still OWE: $45,276.63. No bankruptcy or forgiveness allowed only death or total disability frees you. No social security or Medicare till paid off.” Who knows what her loan repayments are like now, nearly three years later. And still, my point is not about the outrageous costs of college or the out of control and often predatory student lending because if free education was a priority we could fix it. My point is that there is, in the minds of those lining their pockets with gold, there is nothing to fix. And while the researchers and lobbyists and think tanks keep churning out the data about how serious the problem is they all play the same tune like the Pied Piper of Hamlin. As Matthew Segal writes for CNN, “Of all the economic trends holding back America's young people, perhaps the most disturbing is the soaring cost of a post-high school diploma. So many young people have been sold the imperative nature of a higher education.” He then quotes President Barack Obama’s 2009 Speech to Congress that calls on every American to get a degree.

"I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be community college or a four-year school, vocational training or an apprenticeship. But whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma."

What he forgot to say is that the federal government and student loan companies are just dying to lend you some money too. 

Against a backdrop of uncertainty, of scarcity, shortages, and limits higher education appears tangible, even manageable. But as students find out the costs of college are many and debts unimaginably high many leave, and those that manage to finish bring with them into the world a debt that for all intents and purposes has been justifiable and logical.

Discussion

In order to separate debt production from the pursuit of knowledge we must expose that the promise of social mobility through higher education is flawed. Indeed it is a lie should you have to take on debt to get an education. Despite investing in themselves through post secondary education, many graduates and non-graduates struggle with student debt burdens, unemployment, and fail to be financially self-sufficient. In a recently published report from the Take Charge America Institute at the University of Arizona, researchers found that two thirds of UA graduates are not financially self-sufficient, with many of them needing to borrow money from guardians or other credit sources. The Report, “Life After College: Drivers for Young Adult Success” highlights that only about half of graduates had full time employment. The study also found that for all groups, regardless of employment, that debt burden significantly affects well being saying that, “For participants with debt, financial well-being was 17% lower, 19% lower and 31% lower for those employed full-time, employed part-time and unemployed, respectively. Debt was associated with 4%, 8% and 10% lower life satisfaction for those same groups. These findings suggest that more than a financial burden, debt undermines well-being. Furthermore, carrying debt seems to erode the benefits of even full-time employment” (Serido & Shim, 2014, 5). One woman on the Chronicle’s Facebook page commented on the article saying,

“Get used to it...my friends are 6-10 years out of college and still struggling with debt and underemployment. Even those of us who finally have a decent career are paying off the debt we incurred trying to make it here. No stepping stone positions available for this generation, lots of unpaid internships and freelancing.”

In 2012 the economic consulting group National Economic Research Associates, conducted interviews with graduates that held six-figure debts and found that for many life was put on hold. Graduates moved in with parents, worked two jobs, forwent buying a car or a house, and neglected their health and well-being to alleviate the cost of living. And while the average student loan debt in the United States is $25,000 the number of six-figure debtors is growing, and six-figure debt is common amongst graduate students. While Matthew Segal argues that “the deck is stacked against millennials,” suggesting that the problem is localized against one tragic demographic, I reiterate that the deck is stacked against anyone who goes into debt because of education. Of course this position urges the question of what is the role of debt within a capitalist economy more broadly speaking and I welcome that discussion at the end.  

Conclusion

My solution to the production of indebtedness - and thereby the ongoing sustenance for a crisis economy – through higher education is simple yet bold: not only should all education be free but all outstanding student loan debts should be forgiven. You might suggest that this solution is fantastic – as in remote from reality. I would counter that it is necessary because this is about much more than the pursuit of knowledge. This is about the pursuit of human development in harmony with itself and its environment. And such a pursuit is not compatible with the logic of capitalist expansion. Therefore, the problem is not just that the pursuit of knowledge comes at a greater cost these days but that there is any cost at all. And that, is a problem with the influence of capitalism, particularly neoliberal capital, on the structures and functions of higher education.

There are many ways in which individuals become indebted – credit cards, cars, and houses – but higher education is unique. Not only does higher education capture the hopes and dreams of those who attend, it is formative in the production of individual and collective consciousness. And it is formative in the production of indebtedness as a culture, as a social and fiscal relationship. Therefore, by intervening against the production of indebtedness through higher education we insert a new reality, the beginnings of what is conceptually necessary to reform education.