The Debt Trap: Implications for Race and Gender

• Student debt at its highest was more than $1.7 Trillion
• More than all other forms of consumer debt
• It is stripped of bankruptcy protections
• 71% of students graduating from college are in debt
• 40% students who had borrowed money for college are in long-term delinquenc.
• 52.6% Black and 43.7% Latino students are in default. Consider the above statistics

This course is about understanding why student debt became so large. Why is it that Black and Latino students have the highest default rates? What are implications of these long-term debt trap on race and gender in the United States? To understand the broader implications of the debt trap, we need to examine the history of debt. Second, we need to understand it from a global perspective and connect it to local circumstances.

Expected Learning Outcomes

• Understand the historical origins of debt
• Analyze the implications of the shifts in the global political economy in the 1970s that led to the debt trap
• Consider the relationship between Third World debt and student debt
• Understand how the IMF and the World Bank as well as the U.S. Federal Reserve’s role in Third World and student debt
• Make the connections between the racial and gender implications of debt on working class families in the U.S.
• Acquire a familiarity with key debates in the financialization of the economy
• Question established orthodoxy that debt is inevitable
• Look at the organizing efforts that have called to cancel student debt