Princeton University Press
Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost
Key Metrics
- Caitlin Zaloom
- Princeton University Press
- Hardcover
- 9780691164311
- 8.5 X 5.6 X 1.2 inches
- 1.05 pounds
- Social Science > Sociology - Marriage & Family
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
How the financial pressures of paying for college affect the lives and well-being of middle-class families
The struggle to pay for college is one of the defining features of middle-class life in America today. At kitchen tables all across the country, parents agonize over whether to burden their children with loans or to sacrifice their own financial security by taking out a second mortgage or draining their retirement savings. Indebted takes readers into the homes of middle-class families throughout the nation to reveal the hidden consequences of student debt and the ways that financing college has transformed family life.
Caitlin Zaloom gained the confidence of numerous parents and their college-age children, who talked candidly with her about stressful and intensely personal financial matters that are usually kept private. In this remarkable book, Zaloom describes the profound moral conflicts for parents as they try to honor what they see as their highest parental duty--providing their children with opportunity--and shows how parents and students alike are forced to take on enormous debts and gamble on an investment that might not pay off. What emerges is a troubling portrait of an American middle class fettered by the student finance complex--the bewildering labyrinth of government-sponsored institutions, profit-seeking firms, and university offices that collect information on household earnings and assets, assess family needs, and decide who is eligible for aid and who is not.
Superbly written and unflinchingly honest, Indebted breaks through the culture of silence surrounding the student debt crisis, revealing the unspoken costs of sending our kids to college.
Author Bio
Caitlin Zaloom is a cultural anthropologist and an associate professor of Social & Cultural Analysis at New York University. She studies the cultural dimensions of finance, technology, and economic life.
Her latest book, Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost, explores how the financial pressures of paying for college affect middle-class families.
Zaloom is also author of Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London, editor in Chief of Public Books, and co-editor of the recent volumes Think in Public and Antidemocracy in America. Zaloom’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and her work has been featured in outlets including The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, NPR, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Times Higher Education.
Research Interests
Culture and economy; cities and globalization; financial markets; technology and cities; science and technology studies; social theory.
Education
- 2002Ph.D. in Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley
- 1995B.A. in Middle Eastern Studies and Modern Culture and Media, Brown University
Source: NYU Institute for Public Knowledge.
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