Student Loans, Debtfare and the Commodification of Debt: The Politics of Securitization and the Displacement of Risk

Soederberg, Susanne

doi:10.1177/0896920513513964

Cited by 23 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Notes 1. These disproportionate effects have also been documented in the context of higher education specifically (e.g., Marez, 2014;Muzzin, 2009;Osei-Kofi, 2012;Rodríguez, 2012;Soederberg, 2014). 2.…”

Section: Declaration Of Conflicting Interestsmentioning

confidence: 81%

Higher Education and the Modern/Colonial Global Imaginary

Stein

Andreotti

2016

Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies

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In this article, we complicate common critical narratives about the neoliberalization of higher education by situating more recent trends within the genealogy of a modern/colonial global imaginary. By linking current patterns of “accumulation by dispossession” with histories and enduring architectures of racialized expropriation and exploitation, we consider both the strategic possibilities and inherent limitations of enacting resistance from within this imaginary. In particular, we engage the imperative to contest new configurations of dispossession while grappling with the ways that violent social relations have always subsidized public higher education. We suggest that facing such paradoxes may be instructive and open up new possibilities, and at the same time, this requires examination of existing investments and attachments.

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Section: Declaration Of Conflicting Interestsmentioning

confidence: 81%

Higher Education and the Modern/Colonial Global Imaginary

Stein

Andreotti

2016

Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies

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“…The financialization of society-the increasing reliance on lines of debt to access basic human needs-impacts U.S. citizens as a whole, but debt disproportionately burdens Black people across gender and class (Martin, 2002;K. Miller, 2017;Soederberg, 2014a). While financialization's anti-Black undercurrents have been documented across sectors like the housing industry, the criminal legal system, and charter school expansion (Lipman, 2013;Taylor, 2016), it remains understudied in higher education.…”

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confidence: 99%

Racial Capitalism and the Black Student Loan Debt Crisis

Mustaffa

Dawson

2021

Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education

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Background/Context Student loans reflect a larger shift in U.S. society in which people are forced to go into debt for basic needs. Student loan debt in the United States has been recognized as a political economic crisis that disproportionately devastates Black people. Scholars have statistically reported on racialized and gendered stratification in student loan outcomes and several name the racial wealth gap as the main contributing factor to the Black student debt crisis. Yet minimal attention has been dedicated to examining, let alone theorizing, the logics and systemic forces that racialize debt in higher education. Purpose Drawing on a theory of racial capitalism, this article fills analytic and theoretical gaps in the study of the Black student debt crisis by detailing how the crisis has been arranged as well as how it functions to constrain, dispossess, and exploit Black people. Research Design This article offers a corrective history, systematic analysis, and theoretical explanation of the Black student debt crisis. Findings/Results The paper draws on racial capitalism to account for how student loans as a policy has relied on anti-Black racial logics and systemic forces. The authors address how Black educational desires are co-opted, the government configures inclusion according to predatory terms, and the student loan industry forms a debt trap that exploits repayment struggles. While the majority of Black people who enroll in higher education never secure the promise of college as always “worth it,” the arrangement continues to be worthwhile for student loan profiteers. Student loans are perfect for racial capitalism because they answer demands for social access and inclusion (which are already reduced to mean credentialism) and reproduce both the disposability and dispossession of Black people's everyday lives. Conclusions/Recommendations The authors call for the full cancellation of student loan debt. This call forms part of a larger mobilization to abolish the racist logics, processes, and policies that make the Black student debt crisis and Black precarity possible in the first place.

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“…This creates problems not only for loan servicers and the government, but also students, who are only eligible for debt forgiveness if they meet required repayments. It is also a problem for investors who have bought securities backed by student loans from the government (Soederberg, 2014b). This highlights that ICLs have the greatest potential connection to actual financial markets through repayment, rather than origination, through the securitisation of income streams.…”

Section: Enforcing Repaymentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bringing finance inside the state: How income-contingent loans blur the boundaries between debt and tax

Bryant

Spies-Butcher

2018

Environ Plan A

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Income-contingent loans are increasingly used by governments around the world to finance the costs of higher education. We use the case of income-contingent loans to explore how states are bringing the architecture of financial markets inside the state, disrupting conventional understandings of marketisation that are linked to concepts of commodification. We argue that income-contingent loans are hybrid policy instruments that combine elements of a state-instituted tax and a market-negotiated debt. We understand this hybrid construction in terms of the actors and mechanisms characteristic of what Polanyi identified in patterns of ‘redistribution’ and ‘exchange’. We then follow the contested mutations of income-contingent loans in Australia, England and the United States along three axes of hybridity that produce a variegated landscape of higher education finance: determining debt, charging interest and enforcing repayment. Our analysis reveals how, as processes of marketisation internalise financial ways of calculating and organising, states are blurring the boundaries between debts and taxes, redirecting political contestation over commodification.

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Student Loans, Debtfare and the Commodification of Debt: The Politics of Securitization and the Displacement of Risk

Cited by 23 publications

References 25 publications

Higher Education and the Modern/Colonial Global Imaginary

Higher Education and the Modern/Colonial Global Imaginary

Racial Capitalism and the Black Student Loan Debt Crisis

Bringing finance inside the state: How income-contingent loans blur the boundaries between debt and tax

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