Student Loans Hit Different Now w/ Ryan Liebenthal

This interview previously aired on Peacock on May 3, 2021. Sam Seder discusses the history of US student loans with Ryan Liebenthal.

We stream our live show every day at 12 PM ET.

We need your help to keep providing free videos! Support the Majority Report's video content by going to

Watch the Majority Report live MF at 12 p.m. EST at youtube.com/samseder or listen via daily podcast at

Read more here

"Forty years ago, it did—a year of tuition and fees at a public four-year university was around $2,400 (in 2019 dollars). Now the cost is four times as much. (For private colleges, that number has tripled, from $10,575 in 1980–1981 to nearly $32,000 by 2019.) About 45 million people in the United States (roughly one in six adults) owe outstanding student loan debt, whose total recently surpassed $1.7 trillion, second only to mortgages, according to the Federal Reserve. That’s about $37,500 per borrower, on average, and always climbing (more if you’re Black, a woman, LGBTQ, or an alumnus of a for-profit or graduate school; less but more onerous if you took out debt but didn’t graduate).

Student debt wasn’t significant enough for the Federal Reserve to track it until 1999, when it hit $90 billion, about a twentieth of its current sum. As the numbers ticked up, it grew from a niche concern—the kind of thing that might particularly exercise, say, a bunch of Occupy Wall Street utopians—into a source of anxious national breast-beating. Formerly seen as “good debt” that would more than pay itself back after the supposed $1 million lifetime wage boost of a degree, it’s now understood to be the albatross weighing down an entire generation."*

Download our FREE app

SUPPORT the show by becoming a member

We Have Merch!!!

LIKE us on Facebook

FOLLOW us on Twitter

SUBSCRIBE to us on YouTube