Going Under to Get Ahead: Paying for College in an Age of Uncertainty

Abstract

Student loans have become a cornerstone of democratized access to higher education. This dissertation contributes a novel approach to conceptualizing the student loan issue: students as consumers—both of college and of the student loans themselves. Through a mixed-method in-depth study of a graduating cohort at a public flagship university, I examine how students perceive these loans and the impact of these perceptions on the subjective experience of contemporary students. I gathered original data using a campus survey of registered seniors, in-depth follow-up interviews with a strategic sample of survey respondents, and a second, post-graduation follow-up interview with the main interview sample approximately two years later. In the first manuscript, I use 111 in-depth interviews to examine the evaluative frameworks students use to assess the legitimacy of student loan-use through the theoretical lens of “economic fictions,” which holds that in the face of unknown outcomes actors rely on socially coordinated narratives about the future to motivate decision-making. I use findings on ‘contested futures’ to argue that the political viability of an economic fiction may be based on a social consensus surrounding the acceptable distribution of risk. In the second manuscript, I present an original conceptual framework for understanding differences between students in how they approach and relate to the use of debt-based aid. I created this concept, which I refer to as orientations to debt, from an iterative analysis of the 178 longitudinal interviews. These orientations to debt cannot be reduced to total loan amount; rather, they are informed by lived experiences with economic (un)certainty and financial control and the information to which a student has access in the present. Among other implications, my findings suggest that variations in student orientations to debt are a likely source of the potential for debt-based aid to alter student trajectories while in college (e.g. dropping out). In the third manuscript, I draw from cognitive linguistic theory and literature on the dual ability of debt to enable as well as constrain in order to present a unique methodological framework that uses metaphorical reasoning—specifically, animal metaphors—as a proxy for student perceptions. Data come from in-depth interviews with 82 student borrowers. Results of this analysis were mapped with student demographic characteristics including race, class, and gender, as well as two additional dichotomous variables that I inductively formed from the interview data: perceived family safety net, and prior disruptive financial event. The results provided a rich and revealing portrait of student perceptions of the role these loans play in their lives: as domestic chore, object of fascination, source of harm, and a constant and incessant burden.