The struggle to pay for college is one of the defining features of middle-class life in America today. At kitchen tables all across the country, parents agonize over whether to burden their children with loans or to sacrifice their own financial security by taking out a second mortgage or draining their retirement savings. Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost, takes readers into the homes of middle-class families throughout the nation to reveal the hidden consequences of student debt and the ways that financing college has transformed family life. Caitlin Zaloom gained the confidence of numerous parents and their college-age children, who talked candidly with her about stressful and intensely personal financial matters that are usually kept private. Throughout the book, Zaloom describes the profound moral conflicts for parents as they try to honor what they see as their highest parental duty, providing their children with opportunity, and shows how parents and students alike are forced to take on enormous debts and gamble on an investment that might not pay off. What emerges is a troubling portrait of an American middle class fettered by the “student finance complex,” the bewildering labyrinth of government-sponsored institutions, profit-seeking firms, and university offices that collect information on household earnings and assets, assess family needs, and decide who is eligible for aid and who is not. Indebted breaks through the culture of silence surrounding the student debt crisis, revealing the unspoken costs of sending our kids to college. Have a money question? Email me here. Please leave us a rating or review in Apple Podcasts. Connect with me at these places for all my content: https://www.jillonmoney.com/ https://twitter.com/jillonmoney https://www.facebook.com/JillonMoney https://www.instagram.com/jillonmoney/ https://www.youtube.com/c/JillSchlesinger https://www.linkedin.com/in/jillonmoney/ https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/jill-on-money https://apple.co/2pmVi50 "Jill on Money" theme music is by Joel Goodman, www.joelgoodman.com. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ask this episode

“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

Transcript

Related