Then & Now
Student Debt as a Civil Rights Issue: A Conversation with Dalié Jimenez and Jonathan Glater
The student debt crisis in the United States has reached record highs, totaling about $1.75 trillion from 45 million borrowers. As millions of Americans await President Biden’s decision about whether to forgive at least part of this debt, Then & Now asks: how did we get to this staggering figure? How did past policy decisions pave the way for this crisis, and how and why have these decisions had a disproportionate impact on Black and Latinx students? Where do we go from here?
Dalié Jimenez, law professor at UC Irvine and Jonathan Glater, law professor at UC Berkeley, both co-founders of the Student Loan Law Initiative at UCI, discuss findings from their 2020 article “Student Debt is a Civil Rights Issue: The Case for Debt Relief and Higher Education Reform” to shed important new light on this major national problem.
The student debt crisis in the United States has reached record highs, totaling about $1.75 trillion from 45 million borrowers. As millions of Americans await President Biden’s decision about whether to forgive at least part of this debt, Then & Now asks: how did we get to this staggering figure? How did past policy decisions pave the way for this crisis, and how and why have these decisions had a disproportionate impact on Black and Latinx students? Where do we go from here?
Dalié Jimenez, law professor at UC Irvine and Jonathan Glater, law professor at UC Berkeley, both co-founders of the Student Loan Law Initiative at UCI, discuss findings from their 2020 article “Student Debt is a Civil Rights Issue: The Case for Debt Relief and Higher Education Reform” to shed important new light on this major national problem.