Luke Herrine of Alabama has written The Destabilizing Politics of Student Debt, forthcoming in the Illinois Law Review. Here’s the abstract:
This Article examines why student loans became central to higher education finance in the United States and how they have undermined their own centrality over time. As the liberal constituency for funding redistributive social programs weakened in the 1970s, student loans enabled stable coalitions in favor of federal support for college affordability by bringing together lawmakers with divergent ideological commitments. Three features made student loans effective coalition stabilizers: their structure as demand-side subsidies that avoided federalism concerns and conflicts over university governance; their “political lightness” as credit programs that satisfied fiscal hawks and could be characterized as either government largesse or individual responsibility; and their creation of a sophisticated lobbying industry-including servicers, guaranty agencies, and for-profit colleges-that advocated for their perpetuation. However, stabilizing higher education finance through debt came with significant costs. The insider-driven politics of student loans involved corruption and fraud. The ideology of individual investment obscured structural labor market inequalities. The focus on demand-side subsidy contributed to a market dynamic that made higher education more unequal and more vocationalized. By the 2010s, these costs began to destabilize the very coalitions student loans had assembled: hidden costs became increasingly evident, scandals delegitimized insider politics, and growing borrower distress fueled an outsider politics against student debt. The COVID pandemic accelerated these dynamics, leaving the politics of higher education finance profoundly unstable. Drawing on scholarship from history, political science, sociology, economics, and legal studies, this Article provides a new framework for understanding the political economy of student loans-one that explains their endurance without treating them as inevitable. Along the way, the Article offers insights into the conditions under which higher education finance might be restabilized, whether through a reformed loan program or through a transition to more direct institutional funding and grants.
