The debt trap : how student loans became a national catastrophe
Josh Mitchell (Author)
Reporter Josh Mitchell's investigation tells the full story of the student loan debt crisis in America. Mitchell shows how the program began in the 1950s, evolved into a grand social experiment in the 1960s, got overtaken by greedy colleges in the 1980s and 1990s, and was unleashed in the 2000s by Sallie Mae, the billion-dollar company that turned student lending into big business. Based on eight years of reporting and hundreds of interviews with the decision-makers who crafted the program, this volume never loses sight of the countless student victims whose lives have been forever altered by a predatory lending system. Mitchell's shows how the narrative of higher education as a ticket to the American Dream fueled the rise of a rapacious system that one of its original architects called a 'monster'". --From publisher's description
Print Book, English, 2021
First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition
Simon & Schuster, New York, 2021