Who Actually Talks About Student Loans — And How

Where *you* went to school matters

NEW CULTURE STUDY POD! This week I’m joined by Nicole Washington to talk about all things F1: what’s behind the recent rise, is it in fact Real Housewives of Monaco, what’s the current drama, and so much more. Because this is a conversation between someone with very little knowledge about F1 (me) and someone with an abundance of knowledge about F1 (Nicole) it’s accessible to all levels of fandom. If you’re utterly mystified by the newfound popularity, this episode’s for you. If you have a text thread dedicated to F1 memes, this episode is also for you.

You can find the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts (this link will bring you straight to it). And if you missed previous episodes on Paw Patrol, Taylor + Travis Deep Diving, and How Clothes Got So Crappy — they’re waiting for you.

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The way we think about something (a policy, a way of being, a diagnosis) often depends on our experience with and proximity to that thing. This is SUPER OBVIOUS statement but worth thinking about, particularly since it has wide-ranging effects on our politics and the general shape of society.

The most classic recent example of this phenomenon: the massive shift in the percentage of Americans who support gay marriage, which skyrocketed from 27% in 1996 to 60% in 2015 (and 71% in 2022). Pollsters attribute the change to something pretty straightforward: more people came out of the closet, which meant more people overall knew, loved, and were related to (out) gay people. The issue became personal, and the thinking changed.

For several years, I’ve been thinking about how our national attitude towards student loans has and will change as higher and higher percentages of adults live with the reality of educational debt. I’m not talking about a few thousand that you pay off in under a decade. I’m talking about large scale, relatively high interest, long-term debt — the sort of debt that hangs over your life, that significantly limits your options and mobility. Heavy debt. Debt that either silences you or makes you want to yell about it until someone will listen.

Right now, about 20% of Americans with undergraduate degrees report having student loans — and 24% of those with postgraduate degrees. Millions of others may have had them in the past, and many of them — especially if they took out those loans before, oh, 2000 — likely had a very different experience of their loans and the repayment process. And then there’s the fact that only 37.9% of Americans over 25 have an undergraduate degree. What I see when I read those statistics = a significant portion of the country without personal understanding or exposure to the current realities of student debt.

So how do they learn about — and come to think about — this debt? The news. Conversations with friends and randos on Facebook who get their ideas from the news. And who’s writing those stories? Do they have personal experience with debt? Do they come from a background that’s more likely to take out loans and/or be targeted for high-interest private loans? How would those stories change if they were?

When Dominique Baker emailed me to tell me she’d recently co-authored a study working through these ideas, I knew I wanted to have a much larger conversation in the newsletter. Dr. Baker is one of my favorite and most trusted thinkers when it comes to higher ed and policy in general, and I think you’ll immediately see why. (We start broad and zoom in over the course of the interview. You don’t have to read the working paper to understand what we’re talking about, but for the policy and stats nerds among us, you can find the paper, co-authored with Jaime Ramirez-Mendoza, Lauren Mena Shook, and Christopher T. Bennett, here).

Dominique Baker is an Associate Professor of Education and Public Policy at the University of Delaware — and you can find her website here.

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I’d love for us to start with some background on how you got interested in the things you’re (academically) interested in. I feel like a lot of people don’t realize that there’s a lot of work to do in higher ed that is…..analyzing and historicizing higher ed!

I’ve always loved detective stories. At a young age, I fell in love with Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, and Columbo. I liked the idea of picking up clues, while paying attention to the innate messiness of human nature, in order to solve a mystery.

At the same time, as I progressed through my own educational career, I found it quite striking how people were systematically sorted into different categories: gifted, advanced, regular, college-ready, smart, etc. I could not reconcile two pieces of my educational journey. One, why was I provided enormous opportunities that were denied to other members of my family? Two, even with those opportunities, why did people still have such damaging assumptions about what a Black girl from the south could do? (We can fight about whether Virginia is the south later. I use y’all in official work communications, I’m southern.)

I was taught about the awesome power that education can hold for liberation. I wanted to see how I could contribute research to help “follow the clues” regarding the role of education in improving people’s lives while keeping in mind the complexity of humanity, especially what it means to be a human in the United States.

Colleges and universities are often seen as key sites of economic mobility. Yet these institutions reside in and are of our larger society. That means they are just as likely to be structured around racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and more. I like to be upfront about that because it means I’m dealing with our reality and can hopefully provide research that has more useful solutions precisely because I recognize these challenges.

These larger interests led me to notice facets of higher education. What does it mean for college to truly be affordable? For whom is it affordable? Who is provided access to a quality education? What learning environments provide the most success for all students to thrive? What is success in higher education?

It’s always a bit funny explaining to people that I study where I work. But there are all sorts of ways to systematically explore how higher education is structured in our world, and what we might do to make sure those structures actually aid in achieving a just society.

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I know this is going back to basics but I feel like it’s important table-setting: why is student loan policy such a “rich text”? (And, side note: how do you engage students/the public in the very idea of thinking of policy *as a text*?) 

Sometimes when I talk to people about my research, they wonder why studying student loans could matter for the entire country given that they only apply to a certain part of our society. In short, I think student loan policy can provide a lens through which we can view the priorities and values of our country.

It’s important to keep two things in mind. One, student loans — and the disproportionate reliance on them by certain groups of people — did not happen in a vacuum. At the same time students began relying more on student loans, our country also began shifting more and more focus on privatizing other public goods. The way that we treat college affordability and funding is part and parcel for how our society views unions, collective action, public K-12 schooling, health care, housing, the climate, and many other issues. When we view higher education as solely a private good, that only benefits the person experiencing the education (and with the only benefit being income), we erode the ability of higher education to be a force for societal good.

Two, I love studying policy because I think it can tell you so much about a society, especially about the powerful people in the society. I like to have people pick a policy and then work backwards, telling me what problem must exist for this policy to be a solution.

For example: if you say we need a policy that will pay teachers more based on whether their students attain certain test scores, it would be reasonable to assume that your theory of action for the policy is that teachers need more motivation to ensure that students score well on a test. But if teachers are already highly motivated to help students score well and the larger issue is that the teacher does not have the time or resources to ensure the students can score well…then you have created a policy solution for a problem that does not exist. This would be even more of a mismatch if students “scoring well” does not actually equate to students “learning” about a subject, since I would hope our ultimate goal is about knowledge and not test taking.

Similarly, when we think about student loan policy, it says a lot about our expectations for who can experience higher education and what we (tacitly) agree is the ultimate goal of college. Folks will sometimes say that the goal of college is to get a better job, because that’s the reason the public gives for enrolling when asked in opinion polls.

Yet if we combine my two points, you might ask, why do people see higher education as one of the key mechanisms for social mobility? Have we as a society hollowed out our social safety net to the point that people feel that attending college and loading themselves up with degrees (and debt) is the only way to provide themselves and their families with security?

We created an entire loan repayment program called Public Service Loan Forgiveness because public service jobs are good for our society yet pay so little that we would not have an optimal workforce in these occupations without the repayment program. Now, one way to fix this is to create a new repayment plan (as the early aughts Congress did), but another way would be to charge less for these degrees (while funding them at a higher rate so that the quality of the education would not suffer) or even, dare I say, paying people in public service jobs more money! The policy solutions we decide on reveal so much about our values. This is one of the reasons I love being a policy scholar! 

I want to hear about your latest research, which I find really innovative and compelling. How did you and your co-authors get the idea to think about social networks of people *writing* about student loan policy? 

Our original project was focused on the text of student loan news articles. We wanted to better understand how race and racism are talked about in the news media. Part of the preparation for this project involved me conducting (off-the-record) interviews with current and former reporters, many of whom write about higher education or student loans. I asked these reporters about the process of publishing an article, about who has power at each decision point, and what they wanted to know based on our (at the time) research questions. A theme from these interviews was that individual reporters could really differ in how much awareness they had about the ways race and racism influence the student loan system.

As we conducted the data collection for the original research questions, it became clear that a lot of the articles were written by the same set of authors. Anecdotally, we noticed that there seemed to be a pattern in where those authors had gone to college (just based on our prior knowledge). At the same time, I was talking to a lot of other scholars about our work and a recurring theme kept coming up that people wanted to know just where these authors went to college and whether that played a role in their writing. So we decided to collect the data!

After our initial data collection on authors, the patterns in college attendance were so stark that we felt we had to know more about the social network across the authors. Overall, we found that more than half of the authors of student loan news articles in our data attended an “Ivy Plus” university (e.g., Columbia University, Northwestern University) or a public flagship (e.g., University of California-Berkeley), even though those types of universities enroll just 8% of college students overall.

Importantly, these two types of institutions tend to have more generous undergraduate financial aid packages and enroll wealthier students than other colleges. Together, these factors mean that students at “Ivy Plus” and public flagship institutions have a very different experience with the student loan system than the majority of college students. That doesn’t mean these authors cannot write well about student loans, but it does mean that they have to go beyond their personal lived experiences (and those of their friends and families) in order to accurately reflect the varied ways students and their families “afford” college.

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We’ll of course link to the article in full so people can access it, but what was the relationship between the “status hierarchy” of the writers (aka, the type of institution they attended) and the language they used to describe student loan policy?  

I’d love to hear, too, about any particular findings or moments in the research that have stuck with you that may or may not have made it into the final piece. 

We were interested in understanding how authors’ educational backgrounds might relate to the way they cover the topic of student loans, especially when it came to racialized terminology (e.g. naming racial/ethnic groups and evoking structural issues such as racism). Previous research has suggested that the status of people in a social network might serve as a buffer, leading people in the “core” of the network to be slower to learn about and adopt innovative practices than their peers on the “periphery” of the network, due in part to their higher status.

In our context, we did find evidence that authors who had attended more influential institutions in the larger social network had a smaller share of articles that used any racialized language. Our research is by no means causal. But we believe it helps to show that there may be a connection between authors’ colleges and the articles they write, which would hopefully provide an impetus for newspapers to consider examining their hiring practices (though there are lots of folks who run newspapers who are likely less interested in engaging in racialized aspects of policy issues).

Three things really struck me as we did this research. One, the study of the media is really siloed into areas like media studies, communications, and some strands of social science disciplines (like political communication in political science). But it’s rare for folks who do not study the media as part of their research agenda to engage with the scholarship on the media, and its vital role in our society.

Two, I did not expect just how low the share of articles with racialized language would be for reporters who have written for the Wall Street Journal. This was especially interesting to me because these authors frequently wrote for other outlets as well (so this is not something that is just about WSJ, this is something about who is allowed to write in the WSJ).

Three, I talked to a lot of reporters about our findings. I was a bit taken aback at just how concentrated the enrollments were at Columbia and Northwestern, especially for graduate school. Over and over again, the reporters shared that our findings directly aligned with their experiences in the newsroom. You can’t help but to wonder whose insights we’re missing out on because they never got to be a reporter because they went to the “wrong” college. Or who has curtailed their reporting because notions of “objectivity” say they can’t talk about institutions outside of the Ivy Plus group.

When you first emailed me, it was because you wanted to talk about ideas that could help make this work available to a broader audience, and I’m thrilled that Culture Study can be a part of that project, and hope it continues to travel in so many other directions.

It can feel kind of meta to talk about the way we talk about something, but I also think it makes us better readers, better consumers of news, better thinkers. I personally feel like the stakes are always high when we talk about student loans, but why are the stakes particularly high in this moment? 

Those “meta” conversations about the way we discuss policy issues are incredibly important. They remind us that the news media has the power to shape the contours of policy debates. These narratives affect what people view as salient problems and viable solutions — and, by the same token, which challenges and potential options don’t get the attention they deserve. 

I think the stakes feel so high at the moment because we’re at a key inflection point in the history of student loans. Last year, following years of advocacy by grassroots activists, the Biden-Harris Administration proposed a one-time student debt relief plan, only for the Supreme Court to block it this past summer. The White House is in the process of putting together a new approach to student debt cancellation, although that approach’s fate is far from certain.

Recently, the U.S. Department of Education resumed student loan payments following a pause that lasted for more than 3 years during the COVID-19 pandemic. Policy scholars talk a lot about the counterfactual, the world that you could have experienced had X not happened. We say that it’s really hard to predict whether having student loans caused someone to change their plans to buy a house or get married because we don’t know what would have happened in their life had they never had student loans. Because of the COVID-19 student loan pause, we actually have this unique environment where a lot of student loan borrowers got to experience a world where they could devote more of their income to their housing, food, others’ care needs, and more.

So a whole lot of people are publicly weighing in on student loans right now . From a news media perspective, this means there are more reporters who do not regularly cover higher education crafting pieces (e.g., politics reporters who, because of what they typically focus on, frame student loans as important because of an upcoming election and may miss some nuance). Thinking from a broader perspective, it also means that folks on all forms of media are talking about student loans.

My beloved Real Housewives will talk about sending their children to college and the spectre of student loan debt. One of the key ways that borrowers found out about the Biden-Harris administration’s debt cancellation plan was through social media platforms where people were talking about it. All of this focus on student loans in an incredibly hostile and contentious information environment means that we must take more seriously how the media, in all its shapes and sizes, communicates about student loans. ●

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You can find Dominique Baker’s working paper — co-authored with Jaime Ramirez-Mendoza, Lauren Mena Shook, and Christopher T. Bennett — here. You can find more of Dr. Baker’s work here.

We’re going to have Dr. Baker come on The Culture Study Podcast to talk about the way we talk about student loans and educational debt in general — but we need your questions.

What would you love for us to talk about? It’s quick and easy to submit your ideas here.