Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

Only a quarter of people graduating from four-year public colleges and universities in the early 1990s had student loan debt; by 2010, two-thirds did. Credit had been deregulated in the 1980s just in time for the business of student loans to explode in the ’90s. When I graduated college in 1976, the total amount of money lent to students to pay for higher education each year was the equivalent of $8 billion—but by the first school year of the 1980s, it had jumped to $22 billion, and in 2005 it reached $100 billion. In other words, over those three decades, while the number of students grew by half, the amount of money they borrowed each year increased twelvefold. For the financial industry, a small revenue stream turned into a great roaring river. For the 45 million mostly young and youngish Americans who today carry an average of $35,000 apiece in student debt, it’s yet another source of economic insecurity that did not exist before everything changed in the 1980s.