Majoring in Debt: A New Film Looks at the Bankification of Higher Education
Total student debt in the United States stands at about $1.4 trillion. That’s similar to the GDP of Canada, or of ten Hungarys. It’s enough to buy a Tesla Model S for every resident of New York State. It’s also the same amount that American corporations have stashed in overseas tax havens. This debt grows at a clip of nearly $3,000 per second.
If you’re young and have received any post-secondary education, you’re probably contributing your own few hundred a month to this monstrosity of obligation. And if you’ve ever had student debt, you’ve probably also had the anxiety that such debt carries with it — the anxiety of making payments, the anxiety of choosing the right career path to make your payments, and the anxiety over what your career path and your debt say about who you are as a person.
You’ve probably also made some bad decisions because of what you owe. It’d be reasonable, then, for you to be scared shitless that should anything go wrong — should you lose your job, should your mom fall ill, should the computers crash — that you (and maybe the entire economy, if the catastrophe’s right) will be crushed by this debt.
A new film by director Hugo Genes, Collegetown, explores the creepy, suffocating feeling of living under a cloud of financial obligation, and the forces that keep that cloud in place. A stylized portrait of wide-eyed co-eds navigating the job market, the debt market, and the meat market of college parties (it’s markets all the way down, brother), the movie flips back and forth between the ivory towers of an unnamed upstate campus and the bank towers of a glowering Manhattan. It’s unclear which poses the greater threat to the innocence of our nation’s youth.
There’s not much in the way of plot or dialogue in Collegetown. Instead, through a hovering, kaleidoscopic survey of students at their moments of greatest vulnerability (financial aid meetings, hazing rituals, job interviews) and of the over-stimulating landscapes that they traverse (raucous frat rows, screen-stuffed classrooms, bank-ad-cluttered streets), the film underscores the social role that higher education has, more and more, come to play: the manic production of debt and of debtors.
Collegetown keeps its focus tight on the connection between the modern university and the debt industry through a series of phenomenological set pieces. Bored students sit in darkened lecture halls with the flashing delights of e-commerce streaming by on their laptops while lecturers drone on about consumer theory and capitalism’s dependence on debt. (This image of cave-bound novitiates lulled to ennui by spectacle and the narratives of neoliberal ideology is a nice metaphor for the life that awaits them after graduation.) Little children sit at the desks of Wall Street power brokers, explaining as best they can (maybe as best as anyone can) the causes of the financial crisis. And newly minted graduates many stories in the sky try to convince themselves, and their banker bosses, that they’re doing interesting and important work.
A beautiful piece of filmwork in its own peculiar, somber way, Collegetown is perhaps most valuable because of the way in which it insistently, almost mournfully makes a heretofore undermade point — that today’s universities and banks are inextricably linked in a project of rent-seeking at the expense of the young. Colleges feed banks with billions in profits off of student debt, while the banks raid the colleges for their best and brightest minds (most already hobbled by extortionate contributions to the endowment). We might even say that the quad and library of postwar idyll are just another (especially lucrative) branch of the industry.
And make no mistake: the industry has won the intellectual as well as the economic battle here. Students today arrive at orientation already speaking the bloodless patois of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, concerned with making the right “investment” in their education and of choosing courses that will lead to “dynamic” career options. It’s now the conventional wisdom of both the left and the right that higher education is nothing more than an especially good consumer choice, a valuable commodity whose value increases over a lifetime. A prudent young American at the ivy gates should care less about self-interrogation or world-exploration than about developing marketable skills.
But here’s the catch: in order to justify the ludicrous investment that is a semester’s payment, you’ve got to earn the big bucks. And the big bucks come from selling the exact sort of commodity you’ve just invested in. (No, not a college education: debt products). Unsure of themselves, but sure of the incredible money they owe, many students today, like Collegetown’s small cast of characters, put themselves through the ringer of big bank recruitment, straining to understand the financial system that has suddenly taken control of their destiny, and how best to please its masters. Thus, for those able to attend the more elite schools, at least, the well-trod path from debtor to creditor, from undergrad to usurer, is paved.
This progression employs a special vocabulary, a cynical employment of mantras like “follow your path” and “make an impact” that appear in college brochures and bank billboards both. And as students’ old high-school identities are broken down by means of modernist poetry, late-night dorm chats, and enforced binge drinking, their new identities glom onto whatever they find lying around. Increasingly, what they find lying around are the shiny promises of the banks.
As the representative kids of Collegetown define themselves through overconsumption (liquor, lessons, loans) and payment for services rendered (the reinvention of self as a job candidate), we begin to realize why this all feels eerily different from your usual hedonistic coming-of-age tale. The adolescents here aren’t wrestling with the conflicting demands of freedom and maturity. They’re wrestling with the conflicting demands of personhood and peonage — their own and that of everyone around them. In a nation of debtors, you’re either owed or owing, and these kids are scrambling to get on the right side of the equation.
Seen from this broader perspective, the accumulation of stupendous levels of student debt, and the college-to-big bank pipeline that feeds off it, are really just epiphenomenal of a general finance-industry annexation of our lives. This encroachment begins by binding us to the banks through the loans that support us (school, car, home, credit card) and extends to the lived ideology of debt-consumerism, which reprograms us to think in terms of financial health, financial planning, financial prudence — while at the same time, of course, bombarding us with inducements to borrow much more than we should. We borrow to live, and live to borrow. We become bank customers first, citizens second.
We used to imagine that the university was a refuge from this and other crass materialisms of American life. The mythos of the campus, with its valorization of mind over money, encouraged the notion that those lucky enough to get there could, for a few years at least, reach for something greater than profit. That dream is vanishing before our eyes. Universities, exhausted by years of public funding cuts (and increasingly managed by financial-sector professionals), are busily reinventing themselves as business-training programs with tons of fun perks. Their students, who came of age in the years following the crisis, hardly know what else to ask for.
It’s this depressing reality, and its toll on young minds and souls, that Collegetown so excellently explores. But it’s not all doom and gloom. By shining a bright light on the seedy underbelly of today’s corporatized university (and by winking at its audience with hints of possible alternatives), the film suggests that we, the indebted, have good reason to engage one of our most time-honored collegiate traditions: rebellion.
It may come as no surprise, then, that Collegetown has faced a difficult time getting screened at the universities it so thoroughly excoriates. With a few exceptions, (the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, and Columbia), school administrators seems disinclined to invite create programming that offers an alternative to the typical corporate-run career event. While Goldman Sachs and its ilk enjoy broad latitude in bombarding and badgering co-eds freshly arrived on campus, the university — ostensible guarantor of free and critical discussion — offers no context in which to understand and assess this Wall Street solicitation (do most freshmen even know what Goldman Sachs does, besides offer big paychecks?). The banks and financial institutions take over the educative function, setting their recruits on an opaque path of competition with scant reflection on the companies’ societal worth.
If the movie is to reach the audience that needs it, students will make it happen. Undergraduates enjoy access to program funding, free event space, and, most importantly, an intellectual community eager to share ideas.
So if you’re a college student facing a heavy loan burden or a touch choice about where to work, check out the movie’s website to figure out how to host a screening. It’ll do you good, and it’ll do your school good.
You’ve got nothing to lose but your debt.
