Elizabeth Tandy Shermer speaks about her new book, Indentured Students. Elizabeth takes Nikki through the history of American education and housing reform during the New Deal that landed us in a crisis today.

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Transcript – 

Nikki Nolan: Welcome to the podcast! It’s so good to have you here.

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer: I’m so excited to be here too. I really am. What better way to close out 2021, right?

Nikki Nolan: Then to talk about the good old student loan debt crisis that we’ve been carrying around for so long.

We’re going to jump right into this. How much student debt do you have right now?

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer: I only have about $14,000 left and it’s funny to say that because that’s from my undergraduate years and I borrowed the maximum amount I could under the federal direct program as an undergraduate. And then I went directly into graduate school. And it’s a different story about that. I was talking to young people about don’t go directly between undergrad and graduate school. It’s actually not a good life choice!

But I had a massive fellowship. And so, the only reason I actually had to take out loans during graduate school, is in one case, my computer died in the middle of the term, and you need a computer, right? You do need a computer. I did not want to put that on a credit card. Then the second thing when you’re in graduate school for listeners who don’t know, you have this period of comprehensive exams. And usually what I would do during the summer is I would teach and do research.

And I did not want to teach the summer of my comprehensive exams because it’s a very intensive period. So, I borrowed enough to live on to get through that summer, and that’s where those loans were. But then, the thing to think about is I’m sitting there in graduate school, even though I was in UAW 2865 [Graduate Student Union], the University of California. I could not afford to pay off my loans while being in graduate school.

And everything from my undergrad was compounding. And then I didn’t start paying back actually until ten years ago. I’m getting ready to have a big fight with the Department of Education/federal loans because they seem to have lost records of the first year and a half of me paying off my loans. I was well, that’s not true. I got records. I have the records.

Nikki Nolan: There seems to be a very consistent pattern that they lose things, especially now we’re going to transition some of these big loan servicers over. I’m just so fearful of what’s going to happen to people’s records.

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer: Yeah, and I have to say, and I think for me, this is one of these truisms, not just about student loans, but as a larger microcosm of American social welfare is that you got to keep the records. You have got to be on top of that. And it’s really hard. Because I managed my father’s elder care. I worked with an accountant just to make sure I have everything right. Because I must file special paperwork, social security, these kinds of things. And he always told me, no one needs to keep these meticulous of records. And I was like, I do. Cause I will say when I was writing this book, indentured students, I would check my friggin loan balance every day just because I was so afraid because this thing has not been working for so long, there have been defaults from the beginning.

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer: Just with, I’m just going to check that balance one more time, just to make sure that last payment went through. Just, just one more time. I did it yesterday, but it’s okay. I’m going to do it again.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah. Let’s get into what has been the impact of student debt on your life?

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer: It’s funny. One of the times I, when I was finishing this book, I finished this book when I had a fellowship, at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences. It’s known as CASBS at Stanford.

And one of the fellows there, one of the other fellows there who had never had a loan, she just looked at me and asked, “what would you do if you didn’t have to pay your student loan balance?” And I couldn’t imagine it. After ten years, I couldn’t imagine it. It was just this thing that had always been there coming out of my checking account that I had to worry about in terms of savings and I worried about no, don’t buy that. Don’t go see a loved one, you have to make sure, there’s this balance. You have to get it down. And it is just this incredible burden. And actually people sometimes ask me where the title of the book came from. And it was listening to other borrowers talking about this burden on their shoulders. Just this, this feeling of being in, people say, enslaved by debt. They say that they felt indentured and all these things, and that’s where it came from. And I just could not imagine it. And then of course it led me to write this book. Because do you mind if I tell the story about how I started this book?

Nikki Nolan: I was going to say, can you please tell us about this book? You’ve talked a little bit about it. I don’t want to tease the listeners anymore. I want you to tell us about this book.

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer: Well and it’s funny because I always tell people when they ask me, but I say read, or they told me they’re going to read. I said should make sure that you read the acknowledgements. Cause that’s where I tell the story of how I came to the book, and I also say for anyone who might be going to graduate school or in graduate school, is, I always say, you read the acknowledgements because that’s how you can tell who the scholar is working with, who they’re talking to. It kind of gives you a sense about what you’re in for.

So, in my case, this book opens with me talking about how my father, all of a sudden was no longer able to live by himself and needed to be in an institutional setting and all this other kind of stuff.

And I had plans for another book I had already finished, my first monograph and two other edited collections. The book that I was going to do was called The Business of Education. And it was going to show how everything that we’ve had in our heads about public universities becoming more private -actually, they’ve always had a lot of private money in there. That higher education in this country has always been a business.

And the plan was to go all over the country and visit these different campuses and really show this came out of, you just have to come out of my earlier work on the Sunbelt.

And that was the idea, is I’m just going to zoom around and go to all these campuses. And then the reality of elder care. And I just could not imagine at that moment how I was going to do that. I just, I couldn’t imagine it. And I’m sitting there and I’m cleaning out my father’s house and he had a real problem with holding onto documents.

They weren’t organized, but he held onto them. And I found, I mean, he had tax returns from my grandparents from the fifties. And so, I had to shred, I was shredding everything because that’s birth dates, that social security numbers, that’s addresses, everything. So, I’m shredding it and I found the student loan documents I signed when I was 17 years old, the very first one I signed. And I was sitting there and I’m still paying this off. And I had a lot more then too. And I just sat there, and I thought well, maybe I could do this because researching student loans is very different from going to campuses all over the country.

It was a very targeted look, especially since I’m from the DC area, near different kinds of archives. And I could do these sorts of really targeted, deep dives fast and then leave. Cause I also had to keep my job in Chicago. And that’s how the whole thing started. I was sitting there like, you know, one doesn’t no one really knows anything about the student loan story. It was this assumption that is just was an unintended consequence, and the real spoiler is the book ends poorly for 45 million of us, owing $1.7 trillion in debt. Spoiler.

But the big spoiler is that this was intentional. The lawmakers were involved in crafting the very famous and celebrated 1965 Higher Education Act. They intended to create a student loan industry. They never imagined how big it was going to get, that is true. But that was the idea. That was the plan and one of the reasons they were doing it was to avoid federal investment in colleges and universities that would have kept the costs down.

Another reason, it seemed an easier way to, in a colorblind way, offer equal opportunities for students of color, without force. And it was just, it was just one of those things that it was just, I always think it’s lawmakers just refusing to confront the inequities sort of, built into the American democratic experiment.

Nikki Nolan: Let’s take a step back. How did we get into this student debt crisis? You alluded to it a little bit but tell me more.

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer: It’s a long story. I think the key thing is that, historically, the United States has left education in general to local and state governments, as well as private institutions and religious organizations. That federal government, reaching way back to George Washington when they would when Congress would not create a University of the United States, but he imagined what private GW is now, George Washington University is now that there has been that habit and custom. And this is even in the sense of if listeners might’ve heard this Morrill Land Grant, and that’s where we get the land grants.

We’ve got to be really careful about celebrating that legislation besides the fact that that land was often violently seized from Native people. And the amazing work on this is everyone should go look at this land grab universities. It’s a digital history project where they have charted where all the endowment money, they have traced it back exactly to these seizures.

And it was also all that money did was provide the endowments for the land grants. It did nothing to force states to provide the funding. And so, the story of the American Higher Education [Act] is constant financial catastrophes for these institutions.

Not every institution is as wealthy as Harvard or Yale, right? And then also have insecure finances and a lot of dependence on tuition. And the thing that’s hard for people to think about is that the tuition seems cheap back then but think about how you have to sacrifice the time not spent working.

And oftentimes these, a lot of American universities, our oldest ones are in remote areas. They’re hard to get to. It would require you to leave your family, the farm, the family business to go risk the money to get the education. When you really wouldn’t see the kind of white-collar jobs that would pay off for that really until the late 19th century, early 20th century. And this sort of uneasy finances with colleges and universities where there are constant closures, constant murders throughout history really sets them up for disaster in the Great Depression.

And one of the key things was that the New Dealers never gave a New Deal for higher education, for a couple of reasons. One is that some of their fiercest critics were academics because the ivory tower was actually very conservative, in the past, and some would say today too.

Then also it was such a break with American tradition to have the federal government provide that money. Now they would offer matching grants and loans for public universities, but not private ones. And what they did, because there’s a lot of clamoring to do something for young people is they created a work-study program.

And the idea was, this is how they’re going to get around this federalism if we’re going to provide the salary for students who are working at colleges and universities that agree to participate in this program. And the reason they’re doing this is they’re trying to remove young people from the labor market. They don’t want them competing for jobs. They don’t want them on welfare. And they’re like, I know what we’ll do, if a campus agrees to participate, we’ll give them the money to pay students for the jobs that the campuses decide that they need done as largely the jobs that they need done.

And there’s not all that much oversight. And think about how, sorry for the language, fucking complicated this is. And as opposed to just giving the money to keep the colleges and universities open, the idea was we’re going to reward the ones who will admit the impoverished. Right? And the thing about it is, one of the benefits of this is that it completely transforms a lot of these new dealers who are usually celebrated.

They didn’t really believe that most Americans could go to college. And work study changes everything because they have the sense that not only should young people go to college, that it actually benefited the country to have a much more educated citizenry, both for the labor market, as well as for this is a chance for these young people to learn, really, to learn more, to be more educated, involved citizens. And that’s one of the reasons why when the work-study is killed in these dramatic congressional fights over the budget, which sound basically like today, spoiler.

But that was the whole idea of the GI bill. The GI bill was just tuition assistance. It was in this case, the federal government paid the colleges and universities the tuition for the veterans enrolled.

It did not force them to take GIs. It also didn’t do anything to make sure that they were, I don’t know, admitting GIs of color. Many of whom would find themselves unable to use their GI bill benefits and the way that they wrote the GI bill, hold your surprise, it excluded a lot of women veterans. But it just kind of kept with this idea that what we’ll do is the federal government’s role is to provide individual tuition assistance as opposed to the kind of direct funding that a college university could use to stabilize its finances and not be so reliant on tuition. And to me, it’s really heartbreaking because you see this habit of trusting that tuition assistance.

This was the role of the federal government. It could be used as a way of encouraging colleges and universities to enroll more people, and ideally offer equal education opportunities. But you see, for me, the thing that I think is so important is that the Roosevelt Administration, the Truman Administration never considered student loans, because let’s think about this.

This is the worst financial product of all time. I’m going to give you a loan for something I can’t repossess. And if I could repossess it, it’s not, it’s not possible for me to actually sell it to someone else. I can’t just sell. No one can sell my diploma, my Ph.D. credentials, or anything like that to someone else. And even if they could, they need me to have those credentials to be able to compete for, not necessarily get a well-paying job. And by the way, the whole collateral that this loan is based on, is me being admitted to a college or university that really requires my tuition money.

It’s just such a bad idea. That’s why we’ve actually had student loans in this country since the early Republic. The only places usually offering them are colleges and universities, wealthy ones, as well as philanthropies because these things are frigging, it’s a terrible financial product. To be honest, that’s where the government guarantee comes from.

Nikki Nolan: Let’s talk about how the guaranteed loan program intended to create the student loan industry?

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer: So the guaranteed student loan program, and I will admit I was wrong about this, initially, the guaranteed student loan program is actually buried in one of the most celebrated pieces of American legislation, the 1965 Higher Education Act. It’s in Title Four.

And the first one is, the first three are about funding directly. Colleges, universities, and their libraries. And then you have tuition assistance, that’s what title four is, and one of the pieces of tuition assistance besides a revival of work-study, as well as a small scholarship program, is the guaranteed student loan program.

You have to think about it as 1960s lawmakers having come of age after the 1930s Federal Mortgage Program. And the key to the 1930s Federal Mortgage Program is instead to have a Public Housing Program. There’s going to be a Home Loan Program instead. And the guarantee though was for the bankers. That if they put the money, if they finance the mortgage, the guarantee was that the bank would be repaid.

Not that you were going to get a house, right? Not that you would be able to always stay in that house, but that the mortgagor would be paid. And that’s exactly what the student loan program is. The guaranteed student loan program. The guarantee was for the bankers, that if they put the money for it, that these private banks put the money forth for this loan, this incredibly risky financial product, they would be repaid.

Not that you, the student would get in. Not that you, the campus would actually get the tuition revenue that you needed to stay open, but that the banker would be repaid. And the way that I think about it, is really Congress at that time is largely white men. It is true. It is Republicans and Democrats. You had liberal Republicans, you had conservative Republicans. You had liberal Democrats, you had very conservative Democrats, particularly from the south and the rural west. But what they could agree on, what they could agree on, is that bankers would be repaid. And from the point of view of these, again, a largely white male Congress was the Federal Mortgage Program seemed like an incredible success.

They did not have the data that we have now, that the Federal Mortgage Program exacerbated wealth gaps, it exacerbated economic inequality between not only races but also between genders. They didn’t have it. We have it now. And so, in retrospect too, this is exactly what has been happening with this guaranteed student loan program, because there was nothing really. It is true the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed, but it’s incredibly hard to enforce that Civil Rights Act. It takes time. We’re still not there.

We had a 1962 Equal Pay Act. Women are still not equally paid. And you had the issue about financial aid officers. Again, campus financial aid officers got to decide where this money was in the 1965 Higher Education Act, who got it.

And they remained less likely to give it to students of color or coeds, women college students. And then, more importantly, women, historically and also people of color too historically have had a huge pay gap. And in the case of women, in particular, women are constantly leaving the labor force to provide care either for children or for elderly relatives. And when you leave the labor force and it’s later that there would be passed different kinds of repayment. When you left the labor force, you still had to pay those loans. Or if later you could pause them, the fucking interest still accrued, and it left them paying more overtime for the same degrees.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah. If you look at all the data, it’s just wild, how much more women end up paying and how much more black and brown people just end up paying the same from all these systems.

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer: And I want to, I want to credit here that so many of the student activists, but also now some of our progressives in Congress who have been screaming their lungs off. That’s a metaphor but screaming that this is not just an issue of economic injustice. This is about racial injustices, about gender injustice, that this is what the student debt crisis is. And we have got to reckon with that period, full stop.

And get the work done. And I have to say the other thing that really gets me about the guaranteed student loan program, they intentionally hid how expensive it was. The way that, the way that the lawmakers constructed the program, the full cost of that program was not known.

It was not showing up on federal books until there was a change in the budget accounting, because one of the big student loan banks actually failed dramatically and it started the process. It took frigging forever. It took 20 years to get to the Direct Loan Program that we have now, realizing just how expensive this guaranteed student loan program was. But one of the other reasons he didn’t know how expensive it was, was because they didn’t collect real data on it until the new millennium.

My favorite example of this is that the treasury kept the data of the debt held by households and nonprofits together really until the new millennium. You can see this exponential increase in debt, but it’s hard to differentiate between household debt and nonprofit debt.

And then they didn’t start breaking out household debt to include student loans, to separate student loans so you could see it until 2003. And then the real data came from both lenders, as well as colleges and state legislators that weren’t until 2008. And that’s why a lot of people think that the student loan crisis is recent.

It’s because we’ve only had the data recently to really kind of do the work that we’re used to in a very data-driven environment to be able to see. There were bankruptcies from the very start, from the very first loan program that was with the national defense education act after the Sputnik satellite that launched. There’ve been defaults since the beginning because this is a terrible financial product. It’s a bad idea.

The key thing is that, in this American system, we need to have a genuinely tuition-free public option. And there is legislation for that called the College for All Act and what it would do is that for families making less than $125,000 a year, that they would not have tuition at a public college or university. That sadly hasn’t gone anywhere.

I have to be honest, even in the original, Biden Administration’s Build Back Better agenda, they were doing the money for two free years of community college. That’s really interesting too. And the reason I think the tuition-free option is really important is because the way to think about how the United States has always sort of dealt with our education is they’ve expected it to act like a market. That colleges and universities have always had to be in competition for each other. For tuition revenue, for donors, for state revenue, for grants, all these other kinds of things.

And it reaches back to the New Deal era where the Tennessee Valley Authority had the Great Water Project. It is and it was a public utility, a public option to lower the cost of electricity. And it did force the private companies to compete to lower their rates, not just in the Tennessee valley or in the south, but across the country.

And that was the whole idea with Obamacare. The idea of the public option was to have a low-cost public competitor to the private health insurance options to have that check. And that’s exactly what tuition-free public colleges and universities, quality ones, could do in that, in that case. I mean, that is the reality of the American higher education ecosystem.

We have more than 3000 types of post-secondary education institutions. My friend calls it an ecosystem but just to have that genuinely low-cost accessible competitor could do a lot. Could do a lot in a very real way. And I think that that’s absolutely fundamental, is that we do have to rethink this and especially since the way that I think about it there are projections right now that the United States could lose half of its colleges and universities between now and 2030. Just because of not just the student debt crisis, but the college financing crisis that a lot of these institutions do not have really sound financing.

And that would be catastrophic, for a lot of reasons. One is we need our colleges and universities for research in the case of the sciences. That’s how we got vaccines. In the case of the social sciences, that’s the expertise about how to roll them out effectively. In the case of humanities, that’s what keeps us sane, and gives us the critical reading, writing, and thinking skills to make sense of the world.

And it’s just that we can’t afford not to do this. And when a college or university closes, it can have a devastating impact on the surrounding communities who depend on it for arts and culture, for jobs, for customers in the case of small businesses. It is like losing a factory because the United States has treated higher education, a business since colonial times. And the thing is right now is that, the question is should Americans go to college or university?

The sad thing is because of the expense, it has made it just about a job. And reaching back all the way to work-study. One of the things that astounded the New Dealers was that everyday people wanted to go to not just to go to college and universities where the young people were eligible for work-study, work-study it was between ages 16 and 25. But they created this other program, which is one of my favorite new deal programs called the Workers Education Project.

And what it was is communities across the country could apply for the federal government to have continuing education programs. And what the New Dealers assumed, and we all know you should not assume. They assumed Americans would only want vocational training and actually what they wanted was the chance to learn and talk and read literature. Talk about current events. Learn more about the US system of government, which is really complex. And it was just this astounding thing for these men. We have to think about the New Dealers again, largely white men, not uncertainly, but largely white men, largely affluent, that all of a sudden they’re like, well, everyday people want to go to college, just like I did.

And they want to study the arts and literature. Yes, they do. And when you put the expense at that, and it also just goes to the fact that so many American jobs, some of them can be nice work, but only if you can get it. And we’ve seen such a degradation of the quality of work and the wages, real wages in this country have been stagnant for the working and middle classes since the seventies. And that’s a tragedy and it just compounds the student debt crisis.

Nikki Nolan: We just heard last week that the student loan pause is going to be extended until May 1st. What are some of the issues about restarting the loans and what can Biden do about this?

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer: I’m really worried about it. I’m worried about inflation. It’s very expensive right now. I’m worried about the end of the spike in inflation, and the end of the eviction moratorium. I’m really worried about it in that context. And especially since, by the way, there’s another variant right now. And who knows-

Nikki Nolan: Yeah.

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer: – many [variants] after this. Then also, of course, the end of the unemployment protections, the unemployment payments as well. And so, it just seems we’re getting ready to send millions of people off a fiscal cliff. And to me the way that I think about this 45 million of us are too big to fail. And it just seems that’s what is being set up to happen. And I find it absolutely terrifying. I really do.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah.

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer: To me, it’s a question of a failure of imagination. What I mean, to imagine something else besides just paying off these loans. And the thing is, that’s not being fair because there are people who have imagined something else. Who have imagined, and I’m going to be very clear about this cancellation, not forgiveness. No one did anything wrong trying to go to college or university. But it should be cancellation, not forgiveness. But there are others who have imagined away in this American system of public and private universities and things like that to have a college for all option to have that public competitor, which again, speaks to American tradition. You could see how you could trace it back to that. And it, just to me, from this administration, it is a failure of the imagination, and we should not let Congress off the hook too. Because Congress could pass this too, right? That’s the thing that was super annoying, at the start of the Biden Administration. I mean, besides his gaff at a town hall, that February town hall, it was dependent on a few, Harvard, or Yale alumni.

Oh my gosh! Listeners, just so people know, Harvard has a no-loan policy for students, doesn’t it mean that their parents are off the hook, but it has it for their students. For their students and the good for the Harvard students for immediately writing in and going and taking to social media, be like, we don’t have student loans. We do not have student loans, but Congress could do something too. Congress could do something, too, for sure. Needs to because that is actually the lawmaking body. The president just shines that.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah. I think what we’ve heard on this podcast is that the reason that they’re not trying to go through Congress is because Biden can sign it away at the stroke of a pen, through an executive order. And if it goes to Congress and they have to allocate a budget, they have to do some of the pay as you go thing. But I don’t know if that’s true. one of the guests said that if it does go through Congress, they have to actually do pay as you go or something.

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer: I say my concern, here’s my concern about that: my concern about this is that we need to have a functioning Congress. We need to have a Congress that can actually pass legislation and work out deals. And I would argue as a historian and I mean, I should just say, I mean, this is one of the big points in my loan book.

Everyone is expected to book about big, bad bankers. Strangely enough, the bankers initially fought the guaranteed student loan program, even though the guarantee was for them. They thought it was more federal overreach. These are very conservative banking institutions, more federal overreaches are not what we need.

There had been state-level experiments with the Higher Education Act. They’re actually looking at what some of the states are doing to do a guaranteed loan program at the state level. The first two are New York and Massachusetts. And then there’s a strange thing that they start doing in terms of having a non-profit, where banks are sort of brokering out these student loans, to different colleges and universities.

They said it was unnecessary, this guaranteed loan program. The amount of work that the Johnson Administration did to stop banker opposition to something that gave them a government guarantee was absolutely extraordinary. In the foreground of this book are a lot of the reasons the original work-study program from the thirties was hoped to be extended and made permanent.

It didn’t happen because of partisan warfare, both between and within the parties before they’re really resorting to what they look like today. Then the GI bill, the GI bill was limited also because of this partisan warfare, the same with the National Defense Education Act and the Higher Education Act. It’s a little bit easier because Democrats have a supermajority in Congress at the time, but even one of the most disastrous is this process called Reauthorization. One of the most celebrated Reauthorizations is in 1972, which adds Title Nine, which is more than women getting to play sports. Okay? And this is what everyone thinks now, was to guarantee equal opportunities for women in higher education.

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer: And the thing is, it doesn’t do anything to make sure that they could pay for it. Just a thought and then it included what are now called the Pell Grants. And that is the money directly from the federal government, not campus financial aid officers who gave out the other money from the federal government in the tuition assistance programs.

But that Pell Grant Program was another one of these covert ways to try and assist students of color. But the problem is, it has never really been well-funded. It was always kept small enough that people would still have to borrow. And those two things barely, it was bitter fights over those two issues. Then what no one blinks an eye about was creating what is called Sallie Mae. That is modeled off the Federal Mortgage Program, a government-sponsored enterprise known as Fannie Mae to make it more profitable to buy and sell mortgages. So, what do they do in the early seventies when there’s a laggard? The student loan industry is laggard. Doesn’t seem to be working as well. They created Sallie Mae modeled off Fannie Mae. And again, I’d like to remind listeners that a mortgage is not the same thing as a student loan, you can sell a house again. But this is what happens.

So when you have a federal system like we do and how the two-party system evolved. And for me, when you asked me, what does President Biden need to do? It’s that Congress needs to do stuff too. Congress is what needs to pass the College for All Act because there’s limits on what a president can do through executive order. And executive orders can be reversed. Congress also needs to pass bankruptcy protection. And there is a bipartisan bill that is not going anywhere right now.

Congress also should update this Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. Again, let’s get rid of that “forgiveness” and actually recognize the many Americans who were finally recognized as being essential. Regardless of if they’re working in the public or the private sector. Best would just of course, obviously to cancel, not forgive, that student debt. And I do understand the budgeting rules around it, but that’s, to be honest, an issue with Congress. Congress needs to stop playing Russian roulette with the American people by passing last-minute, budget reconciliation acts or temporary budget deals. This is no way to keep a democracy functioning. This is no way.

Speaking of which, to be honest, if I could only have one thing, that I do think would actually help the student debt and the college finance crisis, would be to have genuine voting rights. Because we’re having this place where most American people do want a different way of dealing with the question of higher education, they’re not adequately represented in Congress.

And that doesn’t just mean making sure about voter ID laws and everything else in the John Lewis Act that people have been talking about. It also means why is it that the House of Commons in the United Kingdom is bigger than the entire American Congress? We are not being adequately represented. Period.

So if we’re going to have to stick with it, the idea is that yes, it would be great if Biden canceled debt. And I think that there is important work that the Education Department could do in terms of what they’re promising to do right now with a public sector issue, and also trying to figure out different ways to get around the challenges of doing bankruptcy. But that’s just fiddling around the edges of the core that our elected representatives need to do for the American people.

Nikki Nolan: So we’re getting close to the end and how I found you was actually through the Scared to Debt documentary series. They are doing an event with you around your book, The Indentured Student. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer: I am so excited because it’s January 13th. It’s through the University of Southern California’s Caston Center and everyone should go find the link and zoom in because it’s true, I will be there. But I’m really excited to be sharing this virtual stage with other scholars.

Folks who were working in education departments, in law schools, as well as student debt activists who are on the front lines of pushing us. And we should remember that a lot of this really important work to put student debt cancellation and re-imagining higher education financing on the democratic, mainstream democratic agenda that comes back to Occupy [Wall Street], 10 years ago. And we need to celebrate those folks.

I’m excited to be sharing a stage with them. And I think that it’s going to be a really great event, as we try and figure out what might come next with the looming and the moratorium.

Nikki Nolan: Awesome. I will add that to the show notes and make sure that I gets promoted out there. Is there anything else you want to add?

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer: We hit the big ones because the student debt crisis is about class. It’s about race. It’s about gender. And this has been happening for years. My favorite statistic about this, by the way, I’m just going to shove it in there, is that John F. Kennedy begged Congress after the passage of the National Defense Education Act was under his predecessor. He’s like, please don’t think that people, that Americans can just borrow for higher education. And the way that he said it was at the time in 1962. It was $7,000 a year estimated, on average, to go to college. $7,000 a year for one kid. And the average household income was just $5,600 a year. And I think that’s so important for us to remember that higher education has actually not been affordable for the majority of American people for decades. It’s not recent. And we must grapple with this. And we must realize that this is, if you’re cutting off this vital institution, making it hard for it to do the teaching, the research, the development.

Why is it that because colleges and universities are now expected to, they’re now running food banks, housing insecurity programs, because they’re picking up where the government, the state, local and federal government has left us behind. Colleges and universities, along with K-12 schools are at the forefront of meeting food and housing crises. The medical crisis is too. We should not be because it takes away from our ability to educate. And it’s not fair and it doesn’t help anyone.

Nikki Nolan: Wow. So we’ve come to the end. Is there anything that you want to promote?

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer: Oh, my God. My book, Indentured Students, just came out. And so, make sure you read the acknowledgments. It’s the most important part. In fact, you can read all about my music, a cute little cat, and I posted a picture of the book on social media, she’s actually sitting on it. Then I also need to promote, again, this January 13th Caston event, I think it’s really important.

Nikki Nolan: Thank you so much for being here. It was so lovely talking with you.

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer: It’s great to talk to you too.

Nikki Nolan: Matter of Life and Debt is produced by me, Nikki Nolan. Special thanks to Efe Akeman for creating the music and mastering the audio. Additional support and thanks to Emma Klauber, who writes the information and transcripts about each episode. This podcast would not be possible without them. Visit our website for more information, matteroflifeanddebt.com where you can listen, access free transcripts, and get additional context for the subjects you just heard about, subscribe. Absolutely for free that website again, matteroflifeanddebt.com. Thanks again for listening.

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