Mixed Media fabric, gesso and latex paint flag banner (2024) Reads: $23,375.78

Footnote 4

The creation of the student loan financial mechanisms in the US is worthy of public policy case study due to how a noble cause - increasing access to college education - has morphed into public investment for private gain. In Josh Mitchell’s investagative book, The Debt Trap (2021) he maps the players and laws that structured the creation of Sallie Mae a public/private corporation developed by the US Federal Government originally tasked with balancing, “two separate goals. The first goal was the social mandate of opening up America’s universities to the poor and middle class. The second was making money” (40-41). In 1972 when the Student Loan Marketing Association was created by Congress, public good was the social mandate.

Institutions of Higher Education in and of themselves were not always the site of public good. As elite and exclusive opportunities for those who could afford them, Universities were about controlling and consolidating power through knowledge. Black folks and women of all colors were notoriously excluded from higher education for decades. As social norms shifted higher education became framed as a public good necessary for an informed and active citizenry. A well rounded education included humanities, social and natural sciences. The public good involved the reading of novels as integral to the understanding of scientific inquiry.

Today, more and more, the public good is framed as a prepared workforce. Attacks on the liberal arts, like art, humanities, language studies and innovative interdisciplinary research is ubiquitous. STEM is god. What is the pubic good’s future in today’s landscape of incredible student loan debt born by individuals for the pursuit of knowledge intended to support the collective? What is our commitment to the public good of higher education in 2024?

I am an engaged citizen. I am well prepared for the workforce of today. My investment in pursuing knowledge to uphold my part of the public good is maligned as my personal choice. I struggle every single month to make my $549.28 payment. No amount of philosophizing the need for the public good changes this truth.

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Footnote 4

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