Why do people feel it is legitimate to voluntarily take on debt in order to pursue higher education, and then challenge the debt burden later on, when it prevents them from enjoying the lifestyle that an education seemed to promise?
Professor Jean François Bissonnette explores this question in a recent article in Social Science Information. He focuses on England and the United States, where debt has lost its perceived legitimacy and protest movements against student debt have emerged since Occupy Wall Street in 2011.
Bissonnette, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Université de Montréal and an expert on the sociology of economics and political theory, has been interested in this issue since the 2012 student strike in Quebec.
“I was completing my Ph.D. at the time and the slogan ‘We want to study, not go into debt’ resonated with me,” he recalled. “It articulated a critique of debt at a time when reliance on credit was normalized—as it still is today.”
Although Canadian households are among the most indebted in the world, with a debt to disposable income ratio in the 175 to 180 per cent range, “this rather alarming situation is rarely questioned, with the exception of student debt, which has become politicized and contested ground,” Bissonnette noted.
The moral economy of student debt
To analyze the logic of taking on debt to get an education, Bissonnette draws on the concept of moral economy, which considers economic relations from the angle of their perceived fairness or unfairness.
“In the case of student debt, this approach reveals a profound ambivalence,” Bissonnette explained. “On the one hand, the debt is perceived as legitimate because the degree is considered an investment that will pay off in the long run, but on the other hand, this logic leads to accepting a lifestyle based on long-term debt. The ambivalence is embedded in the very nature of debt: debt has a moral dimension related to the obligation to repay and the feeling of owing something. The moral economy approach lets us examine the motivations that drive people to accept indebtedness and also to understand how this acceptance can tip over into contestation.”
Critique of the commodification of education
While Bissonnette makes no normative judgments about student debt, his analysis does have a critical dimension. He points to the transformation of the academy into a “supplier of market services, whereby higher education is reduced to its market value.”
“This shift has been informed by a utilitarian vision of education which regards learning primarily as an individual investment,” he explained. “This view, promoted by economists such as Milton Friedman starting in the 1960s and 1970s, was used to justify the state’s withdrawal from funding higher education and increased reliance on private debt.”
According to Bissonnette, individual financing of education through debt is based on “expectations that are increasingly being disappointed: many students take on heavy debt in the hope of achieving a middle class lifestyle—a stable, well-paid job, home ownership, etc.—but these prospects are becoming increasingly elusive for many graduates, who face a more precarious job market and skyrocketing real estate prices.”
Bissonnette points specifically to England, where the funding model for higher education has changed rapidly: just 25 years ago, university was free, whereas today, tuition fees are £9,250 per year and the average undergraduate leaves school with £45,000 in debt.
“It is estimated that around a third of university graduates in England will never reach the income threshold at which they must start repaying their student loans,” Bissonnette said. “In the U.S., student debt has become an impediment to home ownership for the first time.”
A protest movement emerges
Against this backdrop, a student debt protest movement sprang up in the United States in the wake of Occupy Wall Street in 2011-2012. Groups such as Strike Debt and then Debt Collective worked to politically organize student debtors to fight the power of the financial industry.
“These activists are challenging the moral and political legitimacy of student debt,” said Bissonnette. “They condemn the transformation of education, which should be a right, into a financial product on which creditors speculate. They also point to the double standard between the bailout of the banks during the 2008 crisis and the lack of assistance for debt-burdened households.”
The goal of these movements is to transform debt from an individual burden into a tool of collective action. They advocate strategies such as a debt strike and campaign for free higher education and massive cancellation of existing student debt.
These demands have gradually gained political traction. During the 2020 US presidential campaign, partial cancellation of student debt was championed by several Democratic candidates. Then, in August 2022, the Biden administration announced a plan to cancel some student debt, which would have forgiven up to $20,000 in debt for more than 40 million borrowers.
However, the plan met with fierce opposition, particularly from Republicans, who criticized it as unfair to those who had already repaid their loans or who had not pursued higher education. These arguments eventually led to the program being struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2023.
Towards a rethink of the model?
This debate reveals deep-seated tensions in contemporary society and raises complex questions about social justice, individual and collective responsibility, the role of education and the reproduction of inequality.
Faced with these dilemmas, some are calling for a fundamental rethinking of the higher education funding model. There are calls for a return to largely publicly funded higher education. Others propose intermediate solutions, such as income-based repayment systems or the idea of a “universal student income.”
In Bissonnette’s view, “these are crucial debates, for they bear on the future of our education systems and, more broadly, our societal models. Student debt is a symptom of much broader issues, one that crystallizes tensions between individual aspirations and the common good, between the logic of the market and social rights, between the promise of social mobility and the reproduction of social inequality.”
