The explosion in the cost of higher education in the United States is forcing students to take out heavy loans and to move towards jobs unrelated to their initial aspirations. These loans also make parents precarious and weaken intergenerational cohesion.
Caitlin Zaloom is an economic anthropologist and associate professor at New York University. Indebtedhis latest book, focuses on the financing of higher education in the United States and the debt it generates among the middle classes. While student debt is increasingly defended in France, for example, the book and the case of the United States highlight the unforeseen and sometimes catastrophic consequences of such a policy.
In the United States, the annual tuition fees charged by institutions have tripled in constant dollars in the public sector between 1987 and 2017 (p. 13, for example €18,693 ($21,000) in annual fees for tuition, room and board at the public University of Michigan, p. 86). The increase in the private sector is even more spectacular (p. 13) while there are serious doubts about the quality of the training offered in these institutions, particularly when they are for-profit. To cope with this inflation, loans guaranteed and distributed by the State have been increased. Despite the risk of a crisis similar to that of the ” subprimes “In 2008, the volume of loans increased without preventing the securitization of these loans by banks and the State. Finally, since the 1980s, several surveys indicate that student debt has interrupted the improvement, begun in the late 1960s, in the conditions of access to studies for the most disadvantaged social groups (working classes, African-American populations, etc.).
The consequences of these developments are also felt on a daily basis in the middle classes if we follow C. Zaloom whose ambition is to reveal ” the (…) ways that financial economy has shaped the inner dynamics of American middle-class family life » (“How the Financialized Economy Shapes the Internal Workings of Middle-Class American Families,” p. 3). By “middle class,” she means households that are not wealthy enough (over $50,000 in annual income, p. 4 and p. 200) to qualify for the scholarships intended for the most disadvantaged, but who do not earn enough to pay “cash” the required registration fees (pp. 4 and 202).
The social construction of parents’ “educational obligations”
The main originality of C. Zaloom’s work lies in his methodological choices. Indeed, by drawing inspiration from, among others, the work of sociologist Michèle Lamont and ” understanding moral orientations » (“to understand (which) moral orientations led people to agree to pay so much for their studies”, p. 212), the author used 160 interviews with students, female students and parents who were themselves generally graduates of higher education. She took care to select households and young people with varied profiles. More classically, the communication and public action instruments of what C. Zaloom calls the “ student finance complex » have also been carefully studied. By « student finance complex “, the author means a set of groups encouraging and organizing indebtedness during studies (p. 15): the federal department in charge of education which distributes the most common student loans (repayable over 10 years according to fixed installments at an interest rate of 4.5%); the commercial banks long involved in the distribution and resale of these loans; the financial managers of the institutions; and the private investment companies encouraging parents at a very early stage to open tax-free savings accounts dedicated to paying for studies.
The book also deals first with these companies. The savings accounts they offer can, for example, allow the parents of a child born in 2000 to reach savings of €8,902 ($10,000) by the time they start university by contributing €45 ($50) per month (p. 33). Their advertising, carefully presented by the author, reaches middle-class parents very early on. In this way, investment companies become ” promoters of planning (which) have promulgated a narrative that foresight and responsibility can secure the future » (“the promoters of the narrative that foresight and responsibility can secure the future,” p. 66).
The receptiveness of the middle classes to this story is based on the one hand on the love that parents have for their children (p. 34) and on the other hand on the parents’ own student debt, often marked by the problems it caused them when they left school (p. 36). This results in an unwavering faith in the responsibilities inherent to parents in educational matters, like Patricia, who is convinced despite external events (child’s academic failure, dismissal, spouse leaving, etc.) that it is her responsibility as a parent to consolidate the family’s belonging to the middle class through the higher education of their children (p. 44). The author also highlights the extent to which federal loan application forms, for example by presenting the application as voluntary, consolidate these dynamics of family responsibility and maintain the silence that reigns within the middle classes when it comes to discussing (including with children) the subject of financing studies and the difficulties that parents encounter. The last three development chapters return to these difficulties in more detail.
A weakening of middle-class values
C. Zaloom then returns to the way in which student debt weakens the values of the middle class, returning in particular to the financial contribution expected from parents, the ” Expected family contribution » (EFC).
As in the United Kingdom or in Scandinavian countries (eg Van de Velde, 2008), the middle classes encourage the economic independence of young people. But unlike what happens in these countries, the loan system in the United States has not instituted this standard since the amount of the loans varies according to the level of wealth of the parents. The data entered by the parents in the online form are used to calculate, on the one hand, the amount of these loans, and on the other hand, theEFCcalculated according to algorithms that are generally poorly understood by households (p. 98). Above all, theEFC puts parents at the center of financing studies and contradicts part of the educational values of the middle class. Moreover, the students met by C. Zaloom accept without question the financial responsibility of parents to the point of not making the considerable repayments expected of them, and of them alone, six months after graduation (p. 119). People in training end up realizing that the very rapid terms of repayment of loans tend to push them towards well-paid jobs, but unrelated to their initial aspirations (p. 172). Added to this is the ambiguous role of parents who, after having supported them, end up pushing their children to betray these aspirations by regularly reminding them of the weight that student debt represents when entering working life (p. 188).
A renewal of racial discrimination
Finally, C. Zaloom addresses the additional difficulties faced by the African-American middle classes. He returns to the impasse that the additional loans offered since 1994 at higher interest rates (7%) by the federal government through the program MORE (p. 146).
Unlike other loans, these loans are not taken out by children in education, but by parents. Since its inception, this program has been particularly popular with African-Americans because of the algorithms used to calculate theEFC which are unfavourable to them and because of the type of jobs that this social group holds (less well paid and in the public sector, particularly in care and education, p. 139-140). While MORE emerged as a lifeline for African-Americans, access to MORE was reduced in 2011 for financial reasons. On this recent situation, in a context where African-American students already take on 70% more debt than “white students” (” white students », p. 126), C. Zaloom offers us an extremely precise and detailed portrait of Ramona and Stanley, a couple of African-American parents. We see on this occasion the dramatic consequences of this new policy for these households, the strength and past success of their educational aspirations and mobilizations (pp. 141-145) and the neighborhood and community solidarities that can still allow them today to have their children enter the establishments that the latter have chosen (pp. 148-150).
Pioneering work on student debt
We can therefore say thatIndebted is an absolutely fascinating work for specialists in higher education and the condition of youth and add that it seems to investigate in a heuristic way other fields of research (family finances and middle class values). The scope of the investigation carried out by C. Zaloom, his methodological rigor and his very fine knowledge of higher education and the economy of the United States allow him to reveal the moral and family springs which support student debt in this country and to show to what extent this phenomenon structures the life and the calendar of the middle classes.
In terms of form, one can regret that the order in which the facts are presented and the choice of chapter titles make the book difficult to follow for non-specialists unfamiliar with the educational realities of this country. In terms of substance, one can particularly regret that C. Zaloom has chosen not to engage with theoretical debates on the middle classes. The only reason given is methodological since she has favoured a definition that she presents as very “operational” (” immediately applicable », p. 202) with regard to her subject of study. She therefore chose not to discuss (and clearly to accept as is) the thesis of the precariousness of the middle classes under the regime of the financialization of the economy (p. 216) and not to return to a potentially very unequal fragmentation of these classes, for example, much discussed in France (eg Bouffartigue et al., 2011).
These remarks do not detract from the quality of C. Zaloom’s thinking, whose pioneering work of ethnographic investigation of the upheaval in life cycles that student debt can cause will undoubtedly be a reference in the future if this phenomenon continues to develop.