Student Debt Borrowers Are Filing Appeals As Repayment Looms

In 1972 the U.S. government reauthorized the Higher Education Act with new amendments that not only increased access to college for women and people of color but also left these same students at the “mercy of bankers.” As a result, they were forced to debt-finance their education, as scholar Elizabeth Tandy Shermer wrote in Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in College Debt.

“We as a family have paid all our taxes and conformed to all the bureaucracies that now prevail and yet we find because of the present system that we can’t send our son to college,” a parent from Washington state wrote to the Treasury Department around the time of the reauthorization. As the fear, anger and despondency in letters from families swelled, department officials and Nixon aides began to call them “grief mail.”