Here's How the Student Loan Crisis Happened

The Institute for Humane Studies published this video, which explains how we found ourselves in a student loan crisis. Most millennials are led to believe that the only way for you to go to college is to take on a massive debt burden, but Brian Domitrovic, a professor at Sam Houston State University, says that hasn’t always been true. He explains that the baby boomer generation didn’t really have the concept of student loans, so that if they went to college it wasn’t with this kind of debt. Domitrovic elaborated that it wasn’t until the economic booms of the 1980’s that student loans really got going. This was because students gambled that the economy was doing well, so that whatever jobs they got after college would probably pay for the debt they were taking on. But that gamble isn’t sustainable. As we hit the economic downturn in the late 2000’s, students were still applying for student loans but weren’t getting the types of high paying jobs to pay for it. Domitrovic says that the answer will have to include alternative academic experiences– online learning, more trade specific schools, and a recognized job applicable liberal arts course. And anyone saying that the government should just pay off everyone’s student debt is fooling themselves.