This book examines how student loan debt affects the political participation of university students in New Zealand. Like in many other established democracies, the scale of student debt in New Zealand is unprecedented and rising. 1 In 2016, students leaving study had a median loan of $31,000, similar to rates found in Canada and Australia. 2 In the United Kingdom, students are expected to graduate with an average loan of above ÂŁ50,000âmore than double the debt faced by students a decade ago. 3 And students in the United States in 2016 left university with an average of $37,000 of debt. 4 In these countries, many graduates are expected to still be repaying their loans into their forties and fifties. 5
The statistics that report the exponential rise of student loan debt point to the urgency of the student debt challenge facing many democracies. Yet these measures can also be impersonal and somewhat abstract, and it is hard through statistics alone to comprehend how debt is affecting todayâs students. Behind these figures are citizens. Each is negotiating the collective challenge of individually paying a growing share for their education, often compounded by uncertain employment prospects, increasingly low-paid and insecure work, rising housing costs and high levels of consumer debt. 6 These are not future repercussions of student loan debt; they are affecting students now.
This book rethinks student loan debt from the perspective of these citizens. Too often, evaluations of student loan schemes set aside how students experience debt in favour of a more detached economic analysis of average loans, repayment times and graduate destinations. Yet the rise of tuition fees and student loan debt is transforming the everyday lives of many students, including the New Zealand students whose perspectives are included in this book. As the students in the pages that follow explain, debt affects not only their financial security, but also their mental health and wellbeing, their capacity to participate in university life, their ability to make friends and social networks, and their ability to engage in political communities as citizens. I make the case that heeding these student experiences is crucial for invigorating public dialogue about the repercussions of student loan debt.
This is also a book that seeks to bring student debt more explicitly into conversations about young peopleâs political participation in the twenty-first century. Not all student loan holders are young, and nor do all students have a loan. But the holders of student debt are disproportionately young, and exploring the ways students negotiate the tensions of acting politically while taking on unprecedented levels of debt is vital for understanding the political action of students and young people today. As the New Zealand students in this book explain, student debt has the potential to restrict the ability of some students to participate in public life and can inform how students imagine and effect change. Laying bare these political implications of debt exposes the particular challenges of acting politically for a new generation of university students, but also identifies conditions that can support citizens to participate in societies that thrive.
More Than a Loan Balance
The past decade has witnessed growing unease about student loan debt. Although not all student loan schemes are the same, media headlines often contend that student debt is increasingly âout of controlâ, âspirallingâ or âballooningâ. 7 Reports suggest students are struggling to repay oppressive debt or are defaulting on their loans, and that many graduates face a âlifetimeâ of debt or will never pay off their loans. A further anxiety is that burgeoning student debt is threatening precarious macro-economic stability. In the United States, for example, persistent warnings are raised that a dangerous student loan bubble is emerging that might go the way of the housing bubble. 8
Student debt is also a source of political unrest. The twenty-first century has seen what Rachel Brooks describes as a global rise of student protest, from the United Kingdom, to Canada, to Chile and to South Africa. 9 Fee hikes and the growth of student debt have been at the heart of many of these movements. The 2010 protests in the United Kingdom, for instance, saw 50,000 citizens marching in London on one day to oppose fee increases, while the 2012 Québec student strikes lasted over one hundred days. 10 Recent volatility at the ballot box has also been attributed in part to dissatisfaction with student debt, with the issue a focus of electoral campaigns by progressive candidates like Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom, Bernie Sanders in the United States and Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand. 11
Not all commentators agree that there is a student debt crisis, however. A counter claim is that the student debt crisis is a âmythâ perpetuated by individual horror stories that grab headlines. 12 These researchers contend that tales of student debt misery might be troubling, but they also miss the point. Extreme cases of student hardship are relatively rare, the argument goes, and focusing on a few anecdotes is not a sound basis for policy. Nor is reporting total levels of student debt across an economy especially helpful, when this debt is shared across many individuals. Instead, these analyses typically embrace a calculus of averages as a robust way to evaluate loan schemes. 13 On average, student debt is deemed manageable for individuals and their repayment times not excessive. Far from a crisis, it is claimed that the ârealityâ of student debt is that most students are âfineâ. 14
In addition, the same type of aggregate economic analysis often suggests student debt is not only reasonable but also equitable. Student debt is said to be âgood debtâ as the economic benefits of higher education largely accrue to individual graduates in the form of higher earnings, especially those who select the ârightâ type of degree. 15 Loan schemes are claimed to offer a means for social mobility, allowing individuals the choice to invest in themselves as human capital, and to improve their competitive advantage in the workplace. 16 Furthermore, the rise of tuition fees and student debt is said to be part of the solution to the problem of how to make higher education accessible to a growing segment of the population. The shift in the costs of higher education from the state to individual students and their families is said to be the âprice paidâ to enable greater numbers of students to attend higher education, while ensuring that it remains affordable for the taxpayer. 17 When taken together with the higher earnings that graduates on average accrue, Will Davies comments that this economic analysis can make tuition fees and student debt âlook not only fair, but positively redistributiveâ. 18
There is a key limitation with these economic analyses of student debt, however: they tend to treat students as economic subjects rather than citizens. 19 The use of the word âcitizenâ here is deliberate. Over the past three decades, the term has become increasingly absent from public discourse. Media analysis, for instance, has shown that the use of the word citizen was oustripped by the word consumer in English-speaking books and newspapers as early as the mid-1970s. 20 Universities too are sites where the term citizen has been replaced by a market language, reframing students less as citizens receiving a public good and instead as consumers of a service or as commodities of value to the wider economy. 21 ...