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Today, there is a student debt class like no other: about 42 million Americans bearing $1.3 trillion in student debt that’s altering lives, relationships, and even retirement.

“I feel I kind of ruined my life by going to college,” says Jackie Krowen, 32, of Portland, Oregon, a nurse with a student loan balance of $152,000. “I can’t plan for an actual future.”

Almost every American knows an adult burdened by a student loan. Fewer know that growing alongside 42 million indebted students is a formidable private industry that has been enriched by those very loans.

A generation ago, the federal government opened its student loan bank to profit-making corporations. Private-equity companies and Wall Street banks seized on the flow of federal loan dollars, peddling loans students sometimes could not afford and then collecting fees from the government to hound students when they defaulted.

Step by step, one law after another has been enacted by Congress to make student debt the worst kind of debt for Americans—and the best kind for banks and debt collectors.

Today, just about everyone involved in the student loan industry makes money off of the students—the banks, private investors, even the federal government.

Once in place, the privatized student loan industry has largely succeeded in preserving its status in Washington. And in one of the industry’s greatest lobbying triumphs, student loans can no longer be discharged in bankruptcy, except in rare cases.

At the same time, societal changes conspired to drive up the basic need for these loans: Middle-class incomes stagnated, college costs soared, and states retreated from their historical investment in public universities.

If states had continued to support public higher education at the rate they had in 1980, they would have invested at least an additional $500 billion in their university systems, according to an analysis by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.

#college #studentloans #debt #economics

Consumer Reports Condensed Version of below with decent comments section: http://www.consumerreports.org/student-loan-debt-crisis/lives-on-hold/

Full Article - long read, worth the time: https://www.revealnews.org/article/who-got-rich-off-the-student-debt-crisis/