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As students increasingly incur debt to finance their undergraduate education, there is heightened concern about the long-term implications of loans on borrowers, especially borrowers from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Drawing upon the concepts of cultural capital and habitus (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977), this research explores how student debt and social class intersect and affect individuals’ trajectory into adulthood. Based on 50 interviews with young adults who incurred $30,000–180,000 in undergraduate debt and who were from varying social classes, the findings are presented in terms of a categorization schema (income level by level of cultural capital) and a conceptual model of borrowing. The results illustrate the inequitable payoff that college and debt can have for borrowers with varying levels of cultural resources, with borrowers from low-income, low cultural capital backgrounds more likely to struggle throughout and after college with their loans.

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 United States 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 1970s, 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.

The purpose of this chapter is to expand our understanding of the types of Black families that are using Parent PLUS, the types of institutions that rely on Parent PLUS the most, and the outcomes of students who use Parent PLUS to finance their first year of college.

I used descriptive analyses on several datasets collected by the U.S. Department of Education: IPEDS, BPS:04/09, and NPSAS.

The data revealed that (a) of Parent PLUS borrowers, greater shares of low-income Black families are borrowing than White families; (b) many institutions that serve Black students (including HBCUs) give out small amounts of institutional aid but also have much smaller endowments than non-Black-serving institutions; and (c) many families who borrow in their first year stop borrowing in their second year – and of those who stop borrowing, many transfer institutions.

Serving as a starting point in the conversation to Black families borrowing PLUS, this study is not causal and is limited by the unavailability of student-level data on PLUS borrowers. Estimating from nationally representative studies and examining Black-serving institutions is the next-best approximation.

The efforts to standardize financial aid award letters and provide better consumer information to parents must also include PLUS. Moreover, we need to find sustainable solutions for PLUS-reliant institutions to increase their capacity to provide institutional aid.

This chapter contributes to conversation around a controversial financial aid product that has been largely understudied, and in particular for Black families who borrow PLUS at the highest rates.

Purpose – Drawing on a survey of over 1,000 Library and Information Science (LIS) professionals and over a dozen interviews, this chapter explores the student loan crisis from an LIS perspective and offers practical solutions for the field to decrease debt from LIS graduate programs, which has ballooned in recent years.

Design/Methodology/Approach – In April 2016, I sent a survey via email to approximately 10 library-affiliated listservs ranging from Code4Lib to the UMD iSchool discussion list. While I attempted to keep the reach small and controlled to only library-affiliated listservs, the survey link quickly spread to Twitter and other social media. The survey attracted 1,630 qualified responses and ran for two weeks in total. Using skip logic, all potential respondents who did not attend a library school (26 in total) were automatically disqualified. Email addresses were provided by 497 participants for interview post-survey. I received 215 partial responses. In September 2016, I conducted qualitative interviews with participants. Thirty-two telephone interviews were conducted extending for 15–20 minutes and I received 38 written questionnaires in response to my questions.

Findings – The findings are outlined in sub-chapter headings, including increased tuition does not equal increased aid, older students borrow less and take longer in programs tailored to their needs, new graduates unlikely to pay off their loans soon, and students with high undergraduate debt: a divided loan burden. Other findings include interview results, which are embedded within the chapter.

The final section offers recommendations for LIS programs to lessen the burden for students. These recommendations include better financing information and counseling for students; shorter, more flexible degree programs; apprenticeship model, more pathways for a paraprofessional to professional track; and expand public service loan forgiveness programs.

Originality/Value – This is the first comprehensive qualitative/quantitative study of the cost of library school as well as the debt burden for students. It provides actionable outcomes as well as an analytic framework through which to view the academic debt crisis. It features the voices of librarians from around the country as they struggle through a changing job market and increased monetary burden.

This chapter explores the role of student loan debt in the lives of American students and graduates in Wisconsin, US. The total amount of student loan debt in the United States is now at a record high. While debt is considered an integral part of a “forced timeline” toward a greater good, namely the American Dream, it is at the same time a disciplinary mechanism binding individuals to their families in various ways. While most anthropological research on college students and debt has not focused explicitly on student loan debt, this chapter offers insight into a phenomenon currently affecting more than 44 million Americans.

This chapter examines the debt aversion of a group of college students who have the opportunity to take out a sizable, low-interest, non-credit dependent loan. If the loan is simply invested in low-risk assets, it would effectively yield a free lunch in net interest earnings.

The research uses survey data to examine demographic, socio-economic, personality traits, and other characteristics of those willing and unwilling to accept the loan offer, as well as their intentions of early repayment.

Individuals willing to accept the loan tend to have prior debt, longer planning horizons, come from middle-income families, and may have higher cognitive ability. Anticipated early repayment of the loan is more likely among those with prior investments, no prior debt, from STEM majors, with upper income parents, and those who expect to buy a home soon.

We find no consistent relationships between debt aversion and intellectual ability or gender, but this finding may be hampered by our small sample of female loan-rejecters. Our limited sample size also precludes examining interactions between the dimensions of personality types.

We suggest consideration of policies to encourage “smart” borrowing, focusing on the financially disadvantaged, particularly for education loans. This study examines a uniquely occurring natural experiment regarding the opportunity to accept a non-credit dependent loan. Our results describe the behavior of young adults, an infrequently studied yet important segment of the population, especially in the context of borrowing behavior.

This chapter considers how far political devolution has enabled the government in Wales to develop a distinctive approach to student funding. It examines in particular claims that policy choices in Wales on student funding reflect a commitment to ‘progressive universalism’, a term sometimes used by policy-makers in Wales and elsewhere to describe combining means-tested and non-means-tested benefits. The chapter also explores the growing use of income-contingent loans, arguing that such loans complicate debates about targeting and universalism.

This chapter reviews the overall structure of the US financial aid system and the way in which students from underrepresented groups deal with the cost of participating in higher education. Case studies of students from underrepresented groups are used to illustrate the type of problems experienced, including financial loan guilt, economic divisions amongst undergraduates and balancing employment with full-time undergraduate study. It is noted that financial aid only factors in tuition and housing costs, but does not take account of the need to participate in the ‘student experience’. Restricted finances mean that some students are unable to take part fully in social activities or purchase books, all of which are thought to be part of the typical undergraduate experience. Thus, despite efforts to widen participation, the concept of ‘college for all’ can be considered an illusion (Glass & Nygreen, 2011) because universities fail to acknowledge the class and racial hierarchies that shape the culture, an aspect that financial aid alone cannot remove.

Tertiary education in Ghana has seen rapid advancement over the past two decades. This growth is the result of transformative policy reforms such as upgrading polytechnics into higher education status; the establishment of the University of Development Studies (UDS) in the northern part of the country; the amalgamation of existing Colleges of Education into degree awarding institutions; the creation of the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund) to provide supplementary financial support for infrastructure, faculty research and development; expansion of distance education programs; modification of the student loan scheme; and a conducive regulatory environment that encourages private sector participation in higher education provision. In spite of these developments, the system continues to face several challenges such as limited funding to support academic programs; limited participation rates for low-income students, females, and minorities; difficulty recruiting and retaining young academic and research faculty; inadequate research capacities; limited ICT infrastructure to enhance instruction and curriculum delivery and inadequate facilities to support science and technology education; etc. This chapter focuses on the state of public higher education in Ghana with emphasis on current growth and challenges. The chapter offers descriptive analysis based on government policy reports and documents, enrollment data from universities in Ghana, and data from the Ministry of Education and the National Council for Tertiary Education in Ghana.

Without controlling for selection bias and the potential endogeneity of the treatment by using proper methods, the estimation of treatment effect could lead to biased or incorrect conclusions. However, these issues are not addressed adequately and properly in higher education research. This study reviews the essence of self-selection bias, treatment assignment endogeneity, and treatment effect estimation. We introduce three treatment effect estimators – propensity score matching analysis, doubly robust estimation (augmented inverse probability weighted approach), and endogenous treatment estimator (control-function approach) – and examine literature that applies these methods to research in higher education. We then use the three methods in a case study that estimates the effects of transfer student pre-enrollment debt on persistence and first year grades. The final discussion provides guidelines and recommendations for causal inference research studies that use such quasi-experimental methods.