How the financial pressures of paying for college affect the lives
and well-being of middle-class families 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 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. In this remarkable 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. Superbly written and unflinchingly
honest, Indebted breaks through the culture of silence surrounding
the student debt crisis, revealing the unspoken costs of sending
our kids to college.
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