Reagan Created Student Debt Crisis: The Hartmann Report

The Hartmann Report slammed former president Ronald Reagan for creating the student debt crisis by initiating a war against education as early as May 1, 1970, and worsened as he took over the White House.

Photo Insert: After having destroyed low-income Californians’ ability to get a college education in the 1970s, Reagan then took his anti-education program national as president in 1981.

The report claimed that “student debt is a crime, weakening our intellectual infrastructure while maintaining and rigidifying racial and class caste systems inherited from the eras of slavery and indenture.”

Six Republicans on the Supreme Court (SC) just killed President Biden’s student loan debt forgiveness program and celebrated another SC victory in which, on behalf of their neofascist billionaire owners, they’re again “owning the libs.”

They’re ecstatic that poor and working class people — particularly Black women who, as ABC News noted, “hold nearly two-thirds of the nearly $2 trillion outstanding student debt in the US” — will find it ever harder to climb into the middle class, which increasingly requires a college degree.

Student debt also largely didn’t exist in modern America before the Reagan Revolution. It was created by Republicans here in the 1980s — intentionally — and if we can overcome Republican opposition we can intentionally end it here and join the rest of the world in once again benefiting from an educated populace.

Forty years on from the Reagan Revolution, student debt has crippled three generations of young Americans: Over 44 million people carry the burden, totaling a $2+ trillion drag on our economy that benefits nobody except the banks earning interest on the debt and the politicians they pay off.

But that doesn’t begin to describe the damage student debt has done to America since Reagan, in his first year as governor of California, ended free tuition at the University of California and cut state aid to that college system by 20 percent across the board.

After having destroyed low-income Californians’ ability to get a college education in the 1970s, Reagan then took his anti-education program national as president in 1981.

When asked why he’d taken a meat-axe to higher education and was pricing college out of the reach of most Americans, he said, much like Ron DeSantis might today, that college students were “too liberal” and America “should not subsidize intellectual curiosity.” It was the 1980s version of today’s “war on woke.”

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