Last Week Tonight
The student loan system in America is incredibly corrupt. It’s designed to trap teenagers into paying off the loans for as long as humanly possible, in many cases decades, all while the loan companies and universities continue to get richer than the Catholic Church.
John Oliver recently put the corrupt student loan system in his crosshairs on Last Week Tonight and honestly, the most surprising aspect is that it took him this long to go scorched earth on one of the most corrupt systems in America. John Oliver may have touched on student loans in the past, he’s done 346 episodes to date, but nothing like this so far.
A moment that really hits home is just 2 minutes into the clip when he shows a clip of a woman talking about how she’s been paying off her student loans for ten years. She says she started with $80,000 (in loans) and has been paying for 10 years. In that span she has paid $120,000, way more than her loan ever was. But here’s the kicker: she still owes $76,000 because of the grotesque interest rates these loan companies trap teenagers into when they are left with no other choice.
Oliver’s correct, nobody should ever be working and paying off for 10 long years and be in a worse place than when they started. It’s complete nonsense. But that’s precisely what the loan industry wants because there is $1.73 TRILLION in outstanding debt in America with 43 million Americans owing money on student loans.
$1.73 trillion is more than the GDPs of Australia, South Korea, Mexico, Spain, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Israel, and the list goes on and on. $1.73 trillion is more than the GDPs of all but 11 countries on earth and that’s just how much money Americans owe in outstanding student loans. That is criminal.
In a show of just how bad things are, John Oliver called out the company Navient who was outed by a whistleblower who claimed the company trained them to drop phone calls after 7 minutes, something Navient denies.
This deep dive into the privatization is higher education is disturbing but the writing has been on the wall for decades. There is no indication anything will change in the future despite small subsets of borrowers having their loans forgiven by the White House in recent times.