Historical Thinking on Student Debt
What is the need for student debt? Why does one have to go into debt in order to create opportunity for oneself? Student debt or better known in the USA as tuition was historically viewed as the act or profession of teaching, but it has become synonymous today as money that is paid to a school for the right to study there. Tuition has transmuted from the act of doing something for the betterment of a person or people that one cares for (the archaic definition means custody or guardianship) to the act of the pupil needing to earn this right through a form of payment. This seemingly simple twist of the general meaning of this word has had far reaching moral, ethical and societal implications. It has created an expectation that education is not just valuable, but a commodity, sold and bought by the highest bidders. This level of exclusion is not a modern construction, but can be traced back to more ancient times of the Mesopotamian age and earlier when writing and literacy was a powerful tool for the ruling elites. Scribes guarded their (superhuman) abilities to code spoken language in symbols that could not be easily understood without training or education from those who were creating it. In ancient Egypt, literacy was tightly guarded among elite scribes and only people from certain backgrounds were allowed to train to become scribes, in the service of temple, pharaonic, and military authorities. To preserve their status, the hieroglyph system was even purposely made difficult to learn in later centuries. So what does this mean to society today?
It seems that their has always been a link between information and power. This has lead to many forms of closed doors in our world, and continues to divide us. It breeds and reinforces inequality. Liberal Arts colleges and universities struggle to create diverse student bodies while trying to retain their status as elite places of learning that bring more value and innovation to the world. The argument goes if they accepted everybody than their brand would be diminished and with that they wouldn’t be able to charge such exorbitant tuition rates.
So the problem I am examining isn’t just about gaining opportunity by being able to pay for expensive tuitions, but about access to these exclusive pillars of society which can influence much of the course of your adult life. If access is the problem and it comes before the economics of getting in, then I should also research the systems that are already entrenched in our society which virtually guarantee or deny people access into these institutions. But another question is emerging: Does opportunity, success and fulfillment need to be anchored by an education in an elite, exclusive institution? Should it? Or is there a different, more open way to educate people and help them create their own opportunities outside the traditional bounds of society?
