The back-to-school debt blues hit hard on college campuses

Congress, the Supreme Court and the president are still wrangling about student debt relief, continuing with their hyper-partisan and high-profile contest over debt forgiveness for student borrowers. With the fall semester starting back up this week and some 17 million U.S. college students gearing up for a new term, these high-level policy debates seem painfully distant and removed from the intimate and grinding day-to-day realities of student debt on campus. 

I want to take the opportunity to share a bit about what student debt looks and feels like on college campuses, for I encounter it every day at work.

It is common practice for universities, including my own, to block students with unpaid debts to the university from registering for courses, adding/dropping courses and receiving transcripts and diplomas. Invariably, there are students each semester who join my course a couple of weeks late, as they juggle what they owe the university with the timing and amount of student loan disbursements. 

While many in higher education lament the commercialization of higher education and the transactional, consumerist logic that many of our students bring with them to campus —“I pay your salary,” a student once told me after I explained why I wasn’t going to create a study guide for them — it shouldn’t be surprising. For students, financial concerns are woven into the very fabric of their college experience, with universities themselves consistently modeling the pay-to-play framework.

Just as often, it seems, there are students who register for my courses and then drop them a few weeks later, after their student loans are disbursed (loan amounts are proportional to the number of credits students are taking). Students who know they cannot manage a full-time course load register for the credits anyway, taking on future liabilities in order to obtain the funds needed to pay for basic needs now. At my university, a four-year public institution that serves large populations of working-class and first-generation students, students often use these loan disbursements to pay their rent, buy food and manage medical and transportation emergencies. 

In other words, the college student loan system has been partly transformed into a system for obtaining emergency funds, with student debts being diverted away from investment in skill and knowledge development and funneled instead towards basic current consumption.

There’s also a lot of financial anxiety, so much so that I can sometimes literally feel it myself in my meetings and conversations with students. Most student borrowers on my campus are painfully aware of the debt burdens they face in the future, as well as the possible burden on their families if they are unable to pay those debts back (often, parents and guardians are co-signatories on loans and make difficult financial decisions in order to keep students in school). Quite reasonably, this leads many students to set high-performance standards for themselves, for example, expecting a 4.0 GPA every semester.

It’s hard to describe the sheer panic I see from students in this context, for example, if they earn a B instead of an A on an assignment. From a teaching perspective, a B grade is not a failure, not at all. It’s an indication of good student work, but also an indication that improvement is possible. In fact, getting a B on an initial assignment is often a foundation for getting an A on the next one, because people learn in an iterative fashion, over time and with repetition, learning by making mistakes and then fixing them. 

But debt has transformed the learning process from a joyful and nonlinear process of trial and error, a process by which practice and more practice gradually helps students acquire skills and knowledge over time, into an anxiety-ridden and panicked, perfectionist dash to the finish line. Debt permits my students no opportunities for wonderful failures, no gradual or step-wise learning process, no mistakes.

Students who decide to attend college or university must, by law, be afforded financial aid counseling if they intend to utilize federal programs, such as the Stafford program, to finance their education. But there are no requirements that such counseling be offered by an independent provider and the public debate tends to overlook entirely the fundamental conflict of interest that this set-up creates. Students are legally required to get advice about borrowing from the same institution that benefits from the loans they take on. 

Never in my 17 years of college teaching across multiple institutions have I heard of a financial aid counselor advising students not to attend the college, or advising them to attend a cheaper college or one that offers a better return on investment. While wonderful and caring counselors abound, like me, they are also tethered and bound to a system that sees students as a great mass of potential tuition-paying consumers ripe for the picking.  

I consistently encounter students in my courses who don’t want to be there, don’t see the point of attending or doing the work, and would much rather be doing something else. I also frequently encounter students who are attending college to provide for their future financial stability, apparently unaware that other, more remunerative possibilities exist. I wonder which of my students this semester could have been happier, more fulfilled and wealthier if they had had a real chance to do something different.

I’m almost done with my first week of classes this semester and I feel a little sick. While our leaders in government continue to quibble about the details of limited student debt forgiveness, the grotesque system of student debt peonage that we call higher education rolls on, crushing my students under its weight.

Sasha Breger Bush is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver and the author of “Derivatives and Development: A Political Economy of Global Finance, Farming, and Poverty” and “Global Politics: A Toolkit for Learners.” For more of her research and writing, visit her Substack and website.