The Student Financial Complex and Middle-Class Moralities

Most young people in the United States aspire to a college education, often encouraged by their families and high school teachers (Goyette 2008). The Higher Education Act of 1965 provided the institutional underpinning for the dream of college-forall with targeted subsidies to public colleges and historically Black and other minorityserving institutions and expanded funding for individual students through federal grants and student loans. This institutional arrangement remained largely in place into the twenty-first century; but as austerity politics reduced federal and state subsidies and grants, student loans became increasingly important in maintaining college access (Goldrick-Rab 2016; Berman and Stivers 2016). Caitlin Zaloom’s excellent book Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost incisively analyzes the structure, consequences, and moralities of the increasingly loan-dependent system of funding U.S. higher education, which she conceptualizes as the ‘‘student financial complex. ’’ An anthropologist, Zaloom analyzes the cultural-institutional structure of the student financial complex as well as individual student experiences within that structure. She draws widely from history, cultural studies, and social science in order to elaborate the exigencies and moralities of the mixed public-private funding model of higher education. She grounds this cultural analysis with an in-depth qualitative study of students and their families. Zaloom studies ‘‘how families make college work at any cost’’ by interviewing students who took out educational loans to attend a four-year college but received no federal means-tested grant aid. She defines these students as ‘‘middle class’’ because they had too little wealth to avoid debt, but too many resources to qualify for the Pell Grant. (The methodological appendix also mentions the criterion that ‘‘parents’ occupations conformed to broad sociological definitions of middle-class work.’’) Zaloom and research assistants conducted 160 interviews, half with college students alone and half with a set of 40 matched pairs of a college student and parent (or parents) interviewed separately, which she calls the ‘‘core of the study’’ (p. 210). The interviews developed through snowball sampling, beginning with students who attended New York University (NYU), where Zaloom is on the faculty in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. As NYU is one of the most expensive private universities in the world, she expands the sample to include students attending public universities in Michigan and one Ohio student attending Howard University, an elite HBCU. She follows three of the matched-pair families more closely—one from NYU, one from Michigan, and the Ohio family—with multiple interviews and visits in order to gain ‘‘long-term ethnographic insight,’’ drawing extensively from her time with these three families in illustrating points throughout the book. The results show how even relatively advantaged families often encounter financial challenges due to health crises, job loss, recession, housing difficulties, and divorce. Despite the structural sources of many of these troubles, the student financial complex instructs families to see their challenges as private, individualized, and at least partially manageable through loans. Indebted shows how these families were compelled to oblige the system despite their financial vulnerabilities and misgivings about taking on debt. Indebted weaves institutional and individual insights together as each of the five empirical chapters builds out one Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost, by Caitlin Zaloom. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. 267 pp. $29.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780691164311. 460 Review Essays