The Student Loan Mess: How Good Intentions Created a Trillion-Dollar Problem

This illuminating investigation uncovers the full dimensions of the student loan disaster. A father and son team—one a best-selling sociologist, the other a former banker and current quantitative researcher—probes how we’ve reached the point at which student loan debt—now exceeding $1 trillion and predicted to reach $2 trillion by 2020—threatens to become the sequel to the mortgage meltdown. In spite of their good intentions, Americans have allowed concerns about deadbeat students, crushing...