greed and the $60 billion student loan industry

Everyone has assumed that the student loan industry is a necessary feature of higher education funding, but this simply isn't so. And it simply isn't necessary that private companies as has been recently reported have managed to lobby and bully their way into dominance over federally funded programs. The scandal might focus our outrage on a few specific cases, but it is the general notion of contemporary indentured servitude that middle class students must enter into in order to get their mortarboards that should truly give us pause.

A debt-ridden student body is an anxious student body: student radicalism of the late 60s was largely due to a certain amount of middle class economic confidence. This of course had a sent of contradictory consequences for the student movement, but as the French figured out after 68 that large public universities should be riot proofed by prison like archicteture, the US found out that economic pressure on the middle class was just as effective at preventing students from asking the harder questions.

You've got to be greedier and greedier just to keep up with the Bushes these days that it is very hard to think of activism as a viable extra-curricular activity, especially when you are owing classy outfits like Student Loan Xpress five figures when you get that BA.