The Debt Trap: How Student Loans Became a National Catastrophe

ISBN: 1501199447

Author: Mitchell, Josh

Condition: New

An NPR Best Book of 2021From acclaimed Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Mitchell, the devastating account (The Wall Street Journal) of student debt in America.In 1981, a new executive at Sallie Mae took home the companys financial documents to review. Youve got to be shitting me, he later told the companys CEO. This place is a gold mine.Over the next four decades, the student loan industry that Sallie Mae and Congress created blew up into a crisis that would submerge a generation of Americans into $1.5 trillion in student debt. In The Debt Trap, Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Mitchell tells the vivid and compelling (Chicago Tribune) untold story of the scandals, scams, predatory actors, and government malpractice that have created the behemoth that one of its original architects called a monster.As he charts the jaw-dropping (Jeffrey Selingo, New York Times bestselling author of Who Gets in and Why) seventy-year history of student debt in America, Mitchell never loses sight of the countless student victims ensnared by an exploitative system that depends on their debt. Mitchell also draws alarming parallels to the housing crisis in the late 2000s, showing the catastrophic consequences student debt has had on families and the nations future. Mitchells character-driven narrative is necessary reading (The New York Times) for anyone wanting to understand the central economic issue of our day.