Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in College Debt

Space in the Zoom webinar is available on a first-come first-serve basis and fills up very quickly, if you are unable to join the session or receive an error message, you can still watch on this page or on the NHC's Facebook Page once the event begins.

Why do 45 million Americans owe more than $1.7 trillion in student debt? Many assume the student debt crisis is the unintended consequences of federal loan programs crafted with the best of intentions. But speaker Elizabeth Tandy Shermer shows that Democrats and Republicans intentionally wanted to create a student loan industry instead of generously funding colleges and universities, which eventually left millions of Americans drowning in student debt.

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer is a Loyola University Chicago associate professor of history who specializes in the history of capitalism, labor, politics, and policy. She finished her PhD at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Since then, her research has been published in op-eds, academic articles, and scholarly books, including Sunbelt Capitalism (2013) and The Right and Labor, a 2012 edited collection done with Nelson Lichtenstein. Harvard University Press published her history of student lending, Indentured Students, in August 2021. 

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University and the National History Center) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partners (the George Washington University History Department and the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest) for their continued support.