When does student loan borrowing prompt relational work between borrowers and their family members? Research on student loans has focused on quantitative estimation of the effects of borrowing on educational attainment, economic well-being, health, and life course milestones. Drawing on sixty interviews with respondents working as lawyers in the northeastern U.S., we argue that student loans also have underappreciated relational effects, even for relatively privileged borrowers. Relational work around student loans is particularly visible during three important moments: the decision to borrow, the decision to partner, and when planning children’s futures. While scholars have examined the effects of borrowing on marriage and childbearing decisions, they have implicitly assumed that it is difficulty repaying that causes such effects. Attention to relational work, however, shows how debt can create additional burdens even when borrowers have the ability to repay, and may help explain why similar debt levels affect different groups differently.
When does student loan borrowing prompt relational work between borrowers and family members? Research on student loans has focused on quantitative estimation of the effects of borrowing on educational attainment, economic well-being, health, and life-course milestones. Drawing on 60 interviews with lawyers in the northeastern United States, the authors argue that student loans also have underappreciated relational effects, even for relatively privileged borrowers. Relational work around student loans is particularly visible during the decision to borrow, when establishing partnerships, and in transitioning to parenthood. It becomes prominent when there is a mismatch between family members’ economic expectations of one another and when shared expectations are difficult to fulfill. Scholars have implicitly assumed that difficulty repaying explains the impact of borrowing on family formation. Attention to relational work, however, shows how debt can create stressors even for borrowers capable of repayment and may help explain cross-group variation in how debt affects family decisions.
The United States has been at the forefront of a global shift away from direct state funding of higher education and toward student loans, and student debt has become an issue of growing social concern. Why did student loans expand so much in the U.S. in the 1990s and 2000s? And how does organization theory suggest their expansion, and the growth of federal student aid more generally, might affect higher education as a field? In the 1960s and 70s, policy actors worked to solve what was then a central problem around student loans: banks' disinterest in lending to students. They did this so well that by 1990, a new field of financial aid policy emerged, in which all major actors had an interest in expanding loans. This, along with a favorable environment outside the field, set the stage for two decades of rapid growth. Organization theory suggests two likely consequences of this expansion of federal student loans and financial aid more generally. First, while (public) colleges have become less dependent on state governments and more dependent on tuition, the expansion of aid means colleges are simultaneously becoming more dependent on the federal government, which should make them more susceptible to federal demands for accountability. Second, the expansion of federal student aid should encourage the spread of forms and practices grounded in a logic focused on students' financial value to the organization, such as publicly traded for-profit colleges and enrollment management practices.
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