This week’s guest, Eli Campbell, shares why he is an advocate for the Student Debt Strike movement and an active member of The Debt Collective, a group that organizes debtors for political action and is calling on President Joe Biden to cancel all student debt in his first 100 days in office.

Campbell’s career goals changed dramatically when he began experiencing symptoms of an undiagnosed genetic illness early on in his college education. Chronic pain forced him to take a step back from his dreams of becoming a musician, and he changed course to a career that he could pursue despite his increased physical limitations. He left school with a degree in digital design & fabrication and around $35k in debt. His experiences led him to research the history and economics of how student debt works.

Among the many unjust practices he was interested in during his research was how student loan asset-backed securities (SLABS) were a little-understood key to how corporations make money off of student debt. In protest of these unfair practices, Campbell has been debt striking since 2018, which means that he is intentionally no longer making payments on his federal student loans.

In this episode Campbell tells Nikki what he has learned about SLABS, why he supports the Debt Collective’s debt strike, and what he thinks is the future of student loans in the United States.

Related Articles & Links

 

Transcript

Nikki: I’m Nikki Nolan, and this is Matter of Life and Death, a show about people in the United States and their student debt. Today’s episode, The Student Debt Strike. I talk with writer and student debtor, Eli Campbell. He has been researching the student debt system and is currently participating in The Debt Collective’s Student Debt Strike. He believes the only way to fix this problem is to forgive student debt and make public universities tuition free. This is his story.
Welcome to the podcast!

Eli: Thanks for having me.

Nikki: I’m so, so excited for you to be here and for us to talk. First, let’s start off a little bit about you. How much student debt do you have?

Eli: I graduated in 2018 with roughly $35,000 in student debt. I actually just looked this morning to keep it current. And I’m up to just under #37K with the interest. Now I have not been paying my loans because I believe that student debt should be canceled and that it’s all illegitimate and I’m choosing to not pay my loans.
But that’s not necessarily the smartest financial choice. Obviously, it’s had a negative impact on my credit score and there’s the potential that the federal government could try and garnish my wages. So there’s definitely very real consequences. For now ,I’ve been able to not pay my loans and still get by, keep a roof over my head. I believe that people who have the privilege and the ability to make a statement and not pay their loans- it’s for everyone to decide- but I feel better not paying them in the long run.

Nikki: What kind of loans do you have? Are they federal, are they private?

Eli: I took out five federal loans for my undergraduate degree, and they’re all in default at this point. So they’re not happy with me, but yeah. Fortunately- I know we’ll get into the research later in the show- but because they’re not private loans, they can’t gamble with them in certain ways.

Nikki: Reading some of your articles about what they’re actually doing with some of the private loans is so wild. I actually linked to your article, not knowing it was your article for the last episode where they got to the point where the woman is not, Ro, is not paying her loans back, but not through a strike- but I would love to get more into this. So you kind of touched on this earlier, but what has been some of the impacts of your student debt on your life?

Eli: Yeah, it’s very related to why I started researching student debt. So when I was in high school, my dream, very idealistic, I wanted to be a musician. I was playing guitar, jazz guitar, and I wanted to study that in school. I, as I’m listening to some of the previous episodes, people start with their dreams and then you hit reality, as you say. And unfortunately, the reality for me was that right when I got into school, when I was about to start studying guitar, I started experiencing really bad pain in my wrist. And in both my arms, actually, it made it pretty much impossible to play guitar. And that was in my first semester at college, I was immediately like, okay, I need to do something else.

This isn’t going to work clearly. Cause I, at that point I didn’t even know what was wrong with me. I didn’t know if I was ever going to be able to do that again. I decided to do visual arts. I had been interested in photography and I started studying photography. At a certain point, I started having more pain in my leg and that was kind of making it difficult to walk and just to get around campus.

And I could still do photography, but I realized that, especially with everyone having a smartphone and I think it’s great because everyone is a photographer. Everyone can produce amazing pictures and it’s very democratizing in a way, but I also wanted to kind of study something that was maybe a little more practical.

So I started studying digital design and fabrication, like CAD. I was like, well, even if I’m really not physically able to do a whole lot, I can still do computer drawings and I can learn how to do 3-d printing, things like that.
I ended up doing design and digital design-related stuff- was in large part because I was dealing with this physical issue. And also because I had student loans. I wanted to get out of college and have skills that I could use to not be in debt forever, hopefully, or at least keep a roof over my head and keep going.

So it’s all very related and I’ve found that people who are differently-abled who have chronic illness who have issues like that in their life, and there’s a whole host of issues that having student debt or debt of any kind, it makes it more complicated. And that was really the reason that I wanted to research student debt to understand why and how this system works, because there’s so many people who have it worse than I do, quite frankly.

I think I’m pretty fortunate that I’m in the position I’m in. And I really think about the people who have it so much worse who are stuck with more student debt, who have more difficult circumstances. And if I’m going on Student Debt Strike, it’s for those people who are really suffering from this system.

If you look at the overall student debtors in the United States, something like 20% of debtors are going into default every year. And especially with what’s happened in the past year with coronavirus. If the federal student debt pause that that president Trump instituted is not extended by Biden, many more student debtors will go into default because people are struggling so much right now.

I think what’s notable about my student debt situation is that my loans are roughly the average amount between $30 and $40,000. That’s the average amount that student borrowers in the United States hold. And the vast majority of student borrowers have federal loans. So I feel like my debt is sort of the very average and- but some people have like $200,000 and it’s grown exponentially.

Mine is pretty normal. And that’s why I think not paying them is sort of, I hope it can be a message to other people that if they have the ability to do so, maybe they can make a statement.

Nikki: So I feel like this is a good point to transition into, like, I want to hear a little bit more about your story. Tell me about you.

Eli: I have a genetic disorder known as Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, hypermobility type. I did not know I had a genetic disorder until I was about halfway through college and I’d already taken out a lot of student loans and I was dealing with a lot of physical pain. I was having some mobility issues. And it was just generally making going to college very difficult. And I had had issues with this while I was in high school and even younger, I just didn’t know what was wrong with me. I just thought, okay, I have weird chronic pain for some reason. But there was the experience of being halfway through school.

I had wanted to drop out because I was in a lot of pain and the having to weigh the decision, well, do I drop out halfway through school with no degree and a bunch of debt that I- how am I going to repay it? Or do I stay in school even though it’s really painful and difficult, just keep going with it? And fortunately, I was able to finish school. It took me five years, but I graduated. and it seems that my symptoms have improved somewhat as I’ve gotten older.
And my father had, he described it as he had growing pains when he was growing up and they got better, but for me, they were a bit more drastic. And so I was able to get through school and I graduated, but that experience- I wanted to understand the system of student debt. I wanted to understand how it worked. And I knew that the student loan companies and debt collectors were making money off student debt, but I wanted to understand exactly why and how they were doing that. So potentially we could, by any means necessary, end the system. And that’s why I started researching students. Yeah.

Nikki: So this was after you graduated, you got into researching student debt, or was this something that happened while you were in school?

Eli: While I was in school, I was, as a good university student is, I was exposed to a lot of activists and people who were interested in how capitalism works, and perhaps understanding if there was a different system that we could imagine and eventually create. And I was particularly inspired by an older comrade who was in the student movements of the 1960s, and he remarked something about how students in the Vietnam War burned their draft cards. Well, not students, I guess, young people because students were not, they could, yeah, they were exempt. That got me thinking well, if that was sort of their generational struggle, how do we get out of the Vietnam War?

I feel like student debt is sort of like millennials and gen Z. Vietnam War. So they were burning their draft cards and I, I was thinking, well, a Student Debt Strike seems like the way to go. Refusing to repay our loans is probably a good way to leverage our, whatever we have, against the system that’s collecting money off of us.

Nikki: When did you come across this concept of the debt strike? Where did this idea come from?

Eli: I was partially inspired to research debt strikes based on this conversation with my comrade, but also because of Occupy Wall Street, there was an organization called the Rolling Jubilee that was buying up basically debt that had lost some of its value. And then they were forgiving that debt, freeing these people from their unpayable debts. And the Rolling Jubilee is the same people and movement is now Strike Debt or Debt Collective. There’s this sort of continuous movement of people since Occupy Wall Street has been fighting against debt. And they’re really now, becoming very prevalent in the political discourse, especially in the past two years.

Nikki: That’s so cool. I didn’t know about this Rolling Jubilee. If somebody wanted to get involved with it, what would they do?

Eli: I’m participating in The Debt Collective’s Student Debt Strike right now. And The Debt Collective is trying to fight to get President Biden to use his executive authority to cancel all federal student debt. That’s 92% of all the student loans that exist right now could be canceled on day one with the stroke of a pen. Joe Biden could do it.
And all evidence points to the fact that he will probably not cancel all of it, if any of it, hopefully some. But The Debt Collective is organizing a Student Debt Strike to try and force him to do that. Now. I am in default on my loans, but The Debt Collective strike is not, you’re not, you don’t have to go into default to participate in their strike.

They consider people who are making the minimum payments or in deferral, or even if you don’t have student loans, you can still participate in the strike by expressing your solidarity. Basically, you sign up at The Debt Collective’s website and it’s really, I think it’s really about the media push to try and convince Biden that he should do this and that student debtors need to be liberated from their debts. They’re unpayable. We need to change the system completely.

Nikki: Yeah. So let’s get into some of the research that you’ve done.

Eli: In terms of the research that I’ve done, I should clarify. I’m not an economist. I’m not a political scientist. I did get an art degree. But the greatest teacher that I’ve had in this field was professor Richard Wolf who’s an economist. He does a show called Economic Update. He does a lot of really great work talking about economics in a way that’s very accessible.

And I started to research well, okay, how does student debt work? How does the government actually appropriate the funds to loan money to people for college. And then the other part of it is how do private corporations make money off of student debt? This was while I was still in school, I was just trying to understand like, okay, well, what kind of debt do I have?

I have federal debt. What does that mean? There’s so much confusion with student debt and from researching it, I think it’s intentional. They don’t want people to understand these debts, because if we understood them, we would understand how badly we’re getting scammed. And we would do something about it.
I started researching student debt while I was in school, and really what interested me were the student loan asset-backed securities. And that’s been a lot of what I’ve been interested in trying to understand how these work.

Nikki: What is a student loan asset-backed security.

Eli: It’s really great that your last episode actually touched on this. The person in your episode mentioned that there’s these companies like Navient are turning student debt into basically sort of like junk bonds. People who remember the financial crisis in 2007, 2008. It was very similar to mortgage-backed securities that- where the banks and financial institutions can take a lot of these mortgages, bundle them all up, and then they can sell that to investors.

So student loan asset-backed securities, they’re doing the same thing with student loans. And there are some key differences, but the- it’s more or less the same kind of financial scam.

Nikki: That’s so wild. When she talked about that in the last episode, I remember I was like, I don’t know why I never thought about that. And then when we started talking, it was a magical moment where dots became connected and I knew people were making a lot of money off of this. It’s wild how hard it is to find the information. They don’t put out statistics of how much profits they’re making.

I believe that the federal government should put out how much they’re profiting on student loans. I think it’s like a very big part of where they’re getting money from the federal government, from the interest on student loans. But I don’t know if it’s true. That’s what I’m saying. I can’t find the information.

Eli: In my research, this has been something that I’ve come across time and time again. Again, I’m not an economist, but if you go on say Navient’s website, you scroll down to the bottom of their website and there’s a little section for investors. Now, if you’re a student borrower where you go to their website and you click the big button that says, pay us back, but they have this whole other section where if you’re a company or an investor. If you want to invest in their student loan asset-backed securities, you can go and you can see all this different information about what their latest offering of student debt products are. And it’s, it’s all very absurd. Being a student borrower and kind of grappling with, they can just buy up our debts and make money on them, hand over fist.

The other thing is people who are in a student loan asset-backed security, probably don’t know it. Which I think is the, the nastiest part of all of this. Some background information on the student loan asset-backed securities: you can’t have your debt be securitized and turned into a financial instrument unless you’ve either got a private loan, you’ve refinanced in with a private loan- so you could have had federal and private debt, but you need to refinance with private loan- or you had loans under the FFEL program, which ended in 2010. Those were basically student loans that were lent by a private lender, but they were backed completely by the federal government. These loans can be turned into these financial products.

There’s a lot of other ways that the student loan companies make money off of our debt and the student loan asset-backed securities are not necessarily the largest or most profitable part of their profit, but it’s the particular nature of them. It always struck me as kind of very devious that they can gamble with our debts.

I mean, there’s so much talk with student debt about personal responsibility and you made financial choices. You should pay back your obligations. But all the while there, there are companies that are doing these completely irresponsible things with our student loans, not to mention Congress.

Nikki: Tell me about Congress. What do, what do you mean by Congress?

Eli: Well, Congress made a number of decisions over the course of the student loan program to make the financing of education into a loan that needs to be paid back rather than increasing grant programs. The kinds of funding for higher education that does not need to be paid back, does not accrue compound interest, and does not trap people in debt contracts that they essentially can’t get out of for the rest of their careers. I mean, Congress- the student debt crisis didn’t really, as you’ve mentioned on a previous episode, didn’t really get to be so bad until the eighties and nineties when it started to become very profitable. And the student loan asset-backed securities are part of this.

It’s also the fact that companies like Navient who are under contract with the department of education to collect on student loan debts.There they’re making money in all these different ways that they shouldn’t be doing while they’re under contract with the Department of Education. With student debt, you have a servicer and you have collections and you have all these different functions of student lending that they’re not really supposed to be done by the same company, but you have companies like Navient that are holding all of these roles. And it’s all very unethical. It’s all very corrupt. Congress- many members of Congress have taken donations from the student loan companies over the years. Joe Biden is unfortunately a big one.

I mean he, his bankruptcy bill in 2005 virtually ended bankruptcy protections for student borrowers. So the reason you can’t get out of your student debt in a bankruptcy court is in large part due to Joe Biden. So he, his record on this is not good. And Congress has helped create the problem. Private corporations have made the problem worse. Really, the only thing that can be done is that they should cancel all the debt.

Nikki: Do you believe that’s the only way. I’ve been thinking about this pretty deeply too. And I’m like, what are some of those pathways into making this a more just system? I don’t know the answer. And I’m just curious. ‘Cause I feel like you’ve thought really hard about this.

Eli: There’s been a lot of approaches that people have advocated for over the years, like restoring bankruptcy protections, reversing that Joe Biden’s 2005 legislation would be helpful. It would allow a lot of people who have been making payments for a long time to discharge their loans and bankruptcy. That would definitely be good, but it wouldn’t fix the overall system. There’s also the income-based repayment plans and things like that, that- they don’t get you out of debt, but they make it more manageable. So there’s lots of talk about making those systems more efficient and allowing people to keep paying their debts and make it less devastating or less of a burden, but still not changing the overall system of lending people exorbitant amounts of money to finance an education.

There’s also the aspects on the university side where university tuition has gone up. And for instance, I’m in New York state. In New York, before the financial crisis, the ratio between how much money was of the university budget was being funded by tuition dollars versus government funding completely flipped after the financial crisis. And then students were paying more in tuition. And so student lenders can lend these massive amounts of money to students.

There’s a lot of different issues, but I think really the only way to deal with this problem is we need to cancel all student debt and make all public universities, tuition- free. Representative Ilhan Omar and Senator Bernie Sanders presented legislation in 2019, known as the College For All Act that would do this. There’s other legislation that would go a long way compared to what we have now. But I think that’s the best-case scenario. We cancel student debt and make college free for everyone who can, is able to go.

Nikki: Have you come across this information? And I saw it somewhere and couldn’t track down the source. So I came across the, if they canceled student debt. Imagine everything got canceled, all of it. All a hundred and I think it’s 1.7 trillion or yeah, somewhere in that range? We would be back in the same place in 10 years. We would have that much debt again because- I don’t know where it came from, but I just saw it somewhere. And I wonder if that’s true.

Eli: Yeah. If Joe Biden decided to cancel student debt and, especially now with the Georgia elections concluded, the Democrats have majority in the Congress. They should, if they so choose to, they could pass legislation that would cancel all student debt. If they did that without passing legislation like the College For All Act that makes college tuition-free and does that next step? Yes. The student debt crisis could resume and eventually get as bad as it is again.

I think it’s pretty unlikely, if they cancel student debt, I think they’d have a really hard time convincing students to take out loans if student debt gets canceled. I wouldn’t want to be the student a year later who says, well, okay, I’m going to have to take out loans again, even though they just canceled it.

A lot of critics of student debt cancellation make these arguments in terms of the unfairness of canceling student debt. But I think the only fair thing to do is to do both. To cancel it and also to provide a public higher education funded by the taxpayers. So they often ask the question, how are we going to pay for it?

We can pay for it. We have the means to appropriate money through, through Congress, to pay for everything we want and more, as we’ve seen Trump and his administration has passed. All these tax cuts for the rich, they funded the military time and time again. We could afford all this stuff. We could afford Medicare for all. We could afford the Green New Deal, everything we need to have a livable, happy, healthy future. We just have to do it. And personally, I don’t think Joe Biden’s administration is going to do it unless we take action like the debt collectivist suggesting and go on Student Debt Strike, or make our voices heard in some way. The bottom line, that’s what they listen to.

Nikki: Yeah, I think that it’s important for people not to see the new administration and with the house and the Senate in the position that they are, as the work is not done- to say the least- the work is not done. Is there anything that I haven’t asked that you want to talk about specifically, like, that you feel like you haven’t spoken about yet?

Eli: Well, I think that in the past year with coronavirus, student debt is not, I think, the most pressing issue. It is really important. And I’ve been advocating about this for the past few years. But in the midst of the pandemic and an ongoing crisis of capitalism that frankly started a long time before Donald Trump took office, there are a lot of pressing issues and student debt is one of them among many. But I think student debt is different from a lot of other issues because it deals with the transfer of society between generations. In a sense there’s this conversation that goes on where we’re told, students are told, that you should pursue higher education because it’s your best shot at improving your life, at making a better, having a better shot at life than previous generations.

And I think there’s a profound crisis where we have climate change, we have ongoing wars and police brutality, mass incarceration. We have so many crises right now, but student debt is different because if students and teachers and people in repayment, debtors in repayment can get together and organize around this issue, there’s potential for real action there in a way that there’s not going to be a medical debt strike. People on GoFund me who are trying to fundraise for their insulin or their chemo, they can’t go on strike. But there’s something about student organizing and that the realm of education that there is power there that we can bring about change in society.

Really exciting news, I think, on that front is that recently we have The Debt Collective going on. Debtors are going on debt strike. But then Columbia university, the young DSA chapter organized a tuition strike. So now you have students who are still in school have demands that they’re making of the university administration. Now they’re a private university, so it’s a little different than the public systems. But they’re going on tuition strike. They’re saying they will refuse to pay their tuition unless the university meets their demands. And they’re organizing alongside students from not University of Chicago, but a university in Chicago. There are students in England, I believe Manchester University were also organizing tuition strikes.

So there’s, there’s really this potential now for students and teachers and debtors who have graduated to kind of come together. And make a statement about the system we live in that saddles people with debt that they can never pay off in order to get an education. I think that generational transfer of knowledge is something really powerful and no matter- what they can give us a lot of grief. They can garnish wages. They can destroy your credit score. But they can’t take away our knowledge and our education. And I think that’s the power we have as student debtors.

Nikki: Is there any advice that you would give to yourself as a younger person, knowing what you know now?

Eli: If I could give advice to my younger self, I would say stick to your gut. And like, when I wanted to take a leave of absence, because I was really in pain and having a hard time with school, I wish I had done that. But I didn’t and I got through it and I’m happy that I got through it. But I think I really listened to those voices at the time that said, you’re gonna be stuck with all this debt.

Don’t take more time. But, I think maybe, maybe I even made the right choice at the time to keep going with it. But I wish the system worked in a way that people who were suffering from issues like that, they could take time off and it wouldn’t have a huge financial impact. Just adding one semester to your time at college can be a huge addition of debt.

I know this is supposed to be about advice for my younger self, but really it all just comes down to, we need to cancel student debt. And I guess that’s my advice for people who are younger is to become revolutionary and use your talent and your abilities in any way you can to try and change the system because you deserve better.

Nikki: I agree. We deserve better. We deserve better than the system that is here. Do you have anything that you want to plug? Is there anything that you want to tell people about that they should look into or something about you?

Eli: I would definitely plug The Debt Collective’s Student Debt Strike. They’re trying to make moves right now to get Joe Biden to use his executive authority to cancel student debt. They’re planning a lot right now and it’s definitely a great time to get involved. I would also plug my own website, debtrevolution.org.

I’ve been posting my writing and various research there. I’m currently trying to write a book, weirdly enough, something I’ve never done before. It’s about the ancient history of debt. If people are interested, there’s really great books by David Graber who unfortunately died last year. He was, he’s such an inspiration to the whole movement of people resisting debt.

He wrote this book called Debt: the First 5,000 Years. I’m trying to write a book that goes into some related concepts based on ancient history and how it applies to our situation today. Yeah, join The Debt Collective Student Debt Strike. I would say that’s the most important thing.

Nikki: Thank you so much for being here today. Really enjoyed our conversation.

Eli: Me too.

Nikki:  Matter of Life and Debt is produced by me Nikki Nolan.  

Special thanks to Efe Akmen for creating the music and mastering the audio. 

Additional support and thanks to Sarah Thibault  who writes the information and transcripts about each episode. 

This podcast would not have been possible without them. 

Visit our website for more information matteroflifeanddebt.com, where you can listen, read transcripts, get additional context of the subjects you just heard about, and subscribe- absolutely for free. That website again, matteroflifeanddebt.com. Thanks again for listening.

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe

Listen on