The Debt Trap: How Student Loans Became a National Catastrophe (A Study of Education and Economics)

From acclaimed Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Mitchell, the “devastating account” (The Wall Street Journal) of student debt in America.In 1981, a new executive at Sallie Mae took home the company’s financial documents to review.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” he later told the company’s CEO.

“This place is a gold mine.” Over the next four decades, the student loan industry that Sallie Mae and Congress created blew up into a crisis that would submerge a generation of Americans into $1.5 trillion in student debt.