Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in College Debt by Elizabeth Tandy Shermer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in College Debt by Elizabeth Tandy Shermer Camille Walsh (bio) Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in College Debt. By Elizabeth Tandy Shermer. (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2021. Pp. 400. $29.95 cloth) Elizabeth Tandy Shermer's Indentured Students argues persuasively that the decisions made by politicians, lenders, and higher education administrators throughout the twentieth century have created a structure that burdens millions of people with debt they had no choice but to obtain in order to unlock opportunities otherwise cut off from them by class, race, or gender. Journeying from the troubled history of nineteenth-century land grants to the most recent pandemic pause on student loan interest, Shermer skillfully traces the policy decisions made by the federal government at each point that chose to create or constrain the capacity of higher education to operate in the service of any notion of meritocracy, culminating in federally backed loans that enriched lenders, encouraged higher tuition, and overwhelmed students. This excellent book is well-suited to all institutions, and would be particularly valuable to programs on education, twentieth-century United States history, public policy, political science, and working-class studies. This is a book that introduces memorable characters—from the poignant and all-too-familiar stories of exhausted debtors today in the opening pages, to the post-WWII GI's who astonished both politicians and university presidents by enrolling in higher education in droves after the war, to the wealthy Claiborne Pell whose name one of the few direct aid programs created by the government would bear. This is the first comprehensive history of how the decades-long determination by both the government and schools to avoid substantively funding higher education access for all led to the creation of [End Page 343] loan instruments that offered a windfall of profits to lenders and enabled colleges to grow rapidly by expanding tuition in response to expanded loan "aid." These windfalls for lenders and institutions came at the cost of interest penalties and long-term uncancellable debt as the price of entry to higher education for needy students. But the system also enabled politicians to continue claiming they were against "handouts," calmed the fears of many higher education officials who believed direct funding would inhibit academic freedom and increased access would diminish standards, and placated white southerners who worried that greater financial access to college would undermine segregation. Shermer draws from newspapers, speeches, presidential papers, letters, broadcasts, magazines, legislative debates, university and educational organization archives, and military reports, along with an extensive array of scholarly, nonprofit, and government sources. The book's rich research material is organized largely chronologically, centered on the key policy shifts or debates in a particular era. One of Shermer's most fascinating (and often disturbing) through-lines is the consistent response of those in gatekeeping positions—university officials and politicians in particular, who all, of course, benefited from their own past access to education—to the equally consistent desire of those most disadvantaged by race, gender, and class to access education and improve their futures. These gatekeepers, Shermer shows, simply did not believe that education was or should ever be for the people, or that it was a public good from which society would benefit. One elite university president, confronted with the idea that GIs would soon receive funding for college because of the "unworkable" idea that the income of parents should not correlate with the education of a citizen, lamented that schools would soon be "converted into educational hobo jungles" (p. 96). As Shermer clearly illustrates, we err if we imagine that student loans have created an actual safety net in a nation with almost no others. Instead, she argues, this structure of federally guaranteed loans was intentionally created by policymakers trying to contort their way [End Page 344] out of directly funding both students and schools with a real federal safety net. Along with lenders and colleges, they built a system that preys upon students, largely students of color and particularly women, while enriching banks and keeping institutions of higher education dancing to the tune of tuition-dependent learning. Far from remedying inequality...