America wasn’t always riddled with student loan debt. Here’s the twisted truth behind what caused the cost of higher education to skyrocket.
By Bill Zimmerman
The following is an exerpt from The Student Loan Swindle: Why It Happened – Who’s To Blame – How The Vistims Can Be Saved. Written by Bill ZImmerman, the book explores the origins and depth of our now $1 trillion national student debt bubble, and calls for a national campaign of civil disobedience as the only means to a fair resolution of the crisis at hand. Chapter 3 of the book, “How Did College Tuition Become So Expensive,” is reprinted here in its entirety, by permission of the author.
The student loan crisis is a new phenomenon. Despite its huge impact, as recently as the late 1980s there was no student loan crisis. Then, middle and working class students suffered from cutbacks and had difficulty financing their educations, but overall, while the system of paying for college was beginning to break down, it had not yet become the disaster it is today. The crisis came because in later years the cost of getting a higher education rose many times faster than the overall cost of living. To make matters worse, wages were stagnant and the real purchasing power of working Americans was in decline.
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