Debt and the Job Market: Two Links

by J J Cohen

I'm preoccupied today with this little event, but want to call your attention to a blog post and an article that will give you some food for thought.

First, an eloquent little piece at Queer Urban Ecologies about why student debt matters, even for those who have paid off their own loans. We ought to live in a world in which attending a college or university does not severely circumscribe one's future. We don't live in that world, but a system that encourages, even mandates, that a student incur debt of tens of thousands of dollars (and sometimes a hundred thousand dollars, or more) and then spend ten years paying off that sum is deeply, deeply flawed. To put it bluntly: such incursion of debt is ruinous. Education is a fundamental right, not some kind of merchandise one enters a kind of indentured servitude in order to purchase.

Second, Rosemary G. Feal, the executive director of the MLA, has some eloquent words about the lack of tenure-track jobs at colleges and universities, a state that is rapidly becoming the new normal. I love the closing paragraph of this IHE piece, because Feal gets it exactly right:

True coalitions may have the best chance at changing things, she said. "All the Occupy movements taking place on campuses lead me to think that if tenured professors, administrators, students, faculty members from all ranks and job-seekers join together, then we have a chance for solving some of these huge problems facing us," she said. "We should be one faculty serving all students, and every member of the academic community must do our part to make this happen."