Last week DePaul graduate student Marty Gleason went public about his mounting load of debt in an appeal to Congress to keep the interest rate on student loans at 3.4 percent.
His situation is hardly unusual. Student debt in this country has surpassed the trillion- dollar mark—exceeding even total credit card debt—and is still climbing. And a lot of it is owed by English and philosophy majors now working as baristas, or not at all.
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“By 2003,” Holmes writes, “[SLM] was earning $1.9 trillion a year, with a profit margin of 46.5 percent.” [SLM’s 2003 annual report actually shows net income of $1.53 billion.] (Its CEO, Albert Lord, tried to buy the Washington Nationals and, tired of waiting for tee times, built a private 18-hole golf course.) But when the credit markets seized up in 2008, the federal government stepped in to save Sallie Mae and other private lenders “too big to fail” with multibillion-dollar bailouts.
Holmes, teaching in Europe this summer, e-mailed last week that what we have left is “one trillion dollars of outstanding loans and a system based on ever-higher tuition every year. . . . The substantial work to solve the long-term debt problem remains to be done.”
