Prof. Jeffery Williams recently published an
article in Dissent Magazine comparing educational debt to indentured servitude. In it he states:
Although [student debt] has more varied application, less direct effects, and
less severe conditions than colonial indenture did (some have less and some
greater debt, some attain better incomes) and it does not bind one to a
particular job, student debt permeates everyday experience with concern over the
monthly chit and encumbers job and life choices. It also takes a page from
indenture in the extensive brokerage system it has bred, from which more than
four thousand banks take profit. At core, student debt is a labor issue, as
colonial indenture was, subsisting off the desire of those less privileged to
gain better opportunities and enforcing a control on their future labor.
I encourage you to read the rest of the article or the accompanying
blog post over at Equal Justice Works, they are both interesting and worth the read.
I don't know if I entirely agree with Prof. Williams. Indentured servitude required a person with few other options to do very specific and undesirable labor. I don't think I'm willing to equate my law school debt to those kind of confines. The analogy might be a little more applicable when you talk about people in the lowest SES bracket and the rising cost of even community college. But in that case we're not talking about the $150,000 of debt some of my law school colleagues have taken on.
Obviously Prof. Williams acknowledges all of this.
Where I agree with Prof. Williams is that the students loan system does serve to reinforce class divisions and that reinforcing unfair class segregation and systems of oppression is bad for society.
When I was considering law school I knew that I was going to work in public interest law. I knew I probably wouldn't ever make "real" money and that I definitely wouldn't make it right out of law school. In fact there was a good chance I would have made money if I'd stayed in my JD-free career as a grant writer and fundraiser. But I wanted a law degree. So I did a balancing test and chose to go to a respectable school that gave me (almost) the most money. I didn't think that going to a second or third tier school would inhibit my job opportunities as much as debilitating debt. When I put my deposit down I was gambling on the fact that I'd be employable with a local community org when I graduated...and that it would be more risky to take on 2-3x the debt to go to a "better" school b/c I would then have to take a job I didn't want b/c it was the only one that could cover my repayment expenses. That would have felt like indenture.
My wealthier classmates, those who have parents that can either help with their tuition or living expenses, didn't have to make those decisions.
I'd also be interested in reading more about the effects of debt on low-income, working class, and lower-middle class students during school. Students who are looking at six figure dept often work or think about working when their higher income peers don't. I wonder if there's a correlation between income level, or level of external financial help, and academic performance (or even level of satisfaction with the law school experience).
All that being said, I do feel like this was a choice I made. I'm not sure I fully appreciated the reality of law school culture or the effects the education debt might have on me when I decided to accept my admissions offer, but I have more of a clue than did colonial era indentured servants. The debt is a burden, and if I wanted to attend graduate school of any kind I had to take it on, but I like to think I had some agency in the process.
I get over 100 emails a day. And, like most law students in April, I'm surviving on less and less sleep thanks to the impending finals season. A fantastically out of touch faculty member and administrator at my law school felt it necessary to add this to the pile of already overwhelming email:
