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Introduction “The personal is political.” The second-wave feminist adage coined by Carol Hanisch in 1970 conveyed that the social structures defining gender roles were arrived at through ages of political decisions, and thus can only be addressed politically, not individually.1 This understanding informs the con- versation surrounding student debt in every corner of the political realm. If anything personal in the United States is political, debt is. From an individual perspective, every person makes a decision to borrow to finance anything—a home, a car, and increasingly, postsecondary college and university educa- tion. This is truer now than ever, when roughly one in four American adults hold some student debt.2 The average debt among graduates increases every year, now at $30,000 for new graduates, and student debt now ranks as the highest nonmortgage consumer debt in the United States, surpassing auto loans and credit card debt in 2013.3 What is most worthy of study is how much of the current political structure has facilitated this circumstance, how effective the various policy measures that have sought to address the crisis have been, and what should still be done to address their effectiveness. The student debt crisis is perhaps the latest symptom of the slow death of the “American Dream,” which is best understood as a universal ideological narrative of social mobility and stability that we need not celebrate in order to criticize the erosion of its widespread viability and availability.4 While public higher education funding is being slashed, the archetypal and still predominant liberal arts curriculum in higher education itself is being deval- ued as a punchline, and the entire education sector of the economy is scram- bling to secure a future for its very purpose while it is in higher demand than at any other period. While the value of a STEM (science, technology, engi- neering, and math) education is at an all-time high in public opinion, civic education—education aimed at reproducing the means of citizenship in a