The College Debt Crisis.

I picked up a book at the library today called "the Debt Generation," whose title should be self-explanatory. The argument is that our generation is finding it harder to find meaningful work, is saddled with consumer and educational debt, and is unable to make the bridge to adulthood as quickly as earlier generations did. Society often blames us for our "laziness, lack of drive," et cetera. Anya Kamenentz stops short of saying that this is agism in action in society.

The first two chapters describe quite systematically how college funding - both on the institutional side in the way of providing a high quality education, and on the student's side, providing enough grants to meet the need to pay tuition and fees - were gutted, starting with the Reagan administration. Reagan actually ran for governor in California on the promise that he was not going to allow "the state to subsidize intellectual curiosity." It is understood, in this statement, that higher education is meant for an elite, capitalist class.

The other dynamic I see i play here, however, involves the lowered standard of life for students and recent grads. Are we becoming a class unto our own that cannot get its fair share within the stratified American economy? If overall wealth is going up, yet the young adults' share of that wealth is going down, (as is the lower classes' wealth, and the middle classes' wealth) then whose wealth is going up? Does this foreshadow an intended permanent situation - to chain us with debt so that only a selected few of us can rise up in the ranks?

I am of course skeptical of the whole concept of "rising in the ranks." I've had it driven into me throughout high school and college that I've got to compete - cause its "dog eat dog" out there... especially against those Oriental kids, as my grandpa said, because their parents push them harder for their education and so I've got to compete.

This returns me to a conversation I had with an anti-war protester in Maine, who asked me if college debt was keeping the youth out of the radical movements in college. "Are students so stuck on the treadmill these days that they can't see a way out?" I hope the answer to this question is no - that is, if the situation is indeed that we are on our way to becoming our own class, I hope we can adopt the radical sensibility to build the community that will keep us afloat.