Game of Loans: The Rhetoric and Reality of Student Debt

Description

Why fears about a looming student loan crisis are unfounded-and how they obscure what's really wrong with student lending College tuition and student debt levels have been rising at an alarming pace for at least two decades. These trends, coupled with an economy weakened by a major recession, have raised serious questions about whether we are he

Beth Akers is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. Matthew M. Chingos is director of the Education Policy Program at the Urban Institute and the coauthor of Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America's Public Universities (Princeton).

"In Game of Loans, we learn that only a quarter of first-year college students can predict their debt load within 10 percent of the correct amount, in large part because students are regularly overpromised financial aid in complex deals that then change year by year, just like the subprime mortgages that blew up in 2008."---Rana Foroohar, New York Review of Books "Successfully aimed at non-economists, [Game of Loansis] clearly written. [It is a] powerful antidote to the stereotypes and myths that have grown up around student loans."---David Wessel, Wall Street Journal "For many casual observers, the evidence and arguments presented in ...Game of Loanswill be new. And if [you] read [the] book, that could help inform a public debate that's bound to stick around for some time."---Beckie Supiano, Chronicle of Higher Education "The authors [ofGame of Loans] deserve credit for taking a good hard look at prevailing narratives, such as the one that holds that student loans are causing borrowers to delay major life decisions, such as buying homes or getting married, and building a case that many of those narratives are unfounded."---Jamaal Abdul-Alim, Diverse Magazine "[Akers and Chingos] provide compelling evidence that paying for the costs of higher education is relatively feasible under the plethora of public financing options available." * AEIdeas * "Influential."---Stephen Dash, Forbes.com "Game of Loansincludes a clear and concise analysis of college prices and student borrowing patterns over time, filling in holes in a debate often bereft of relevant and reliable data."---Jason Delisle, Education Next