Student debt converts education into job training and suppresses rebellion.

Evidence

Student loans are a good example: Graduating with debt-loads in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, students rely on a university education less to broaden their minds and more to provide them with workplace-ready skills to pay back their loans (although recent student-led movements such as those in Québec and Chile are very promising). Indebted, at risk subjects are less willing or inclined to risk rebellion or refusal, and the university becomes a commodified space where authentic intellectual risks are discouraged and punished. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 549

Categorization

• XREF: Core to the reader’s goal: financialization colonizing education and imagination, building toward deWaard’s cultural argument. Also echoes the debt-as-social-control thesis in Debt: The First 5,000 Years. — connects to: Student rebellion arises from physiological suffocation rather than revolutionary conditions — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2669; Higher education now produces skills instead of ideals or emancipation. — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 359; Controlling a person’s thinking through education can substitute for coercion. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 867 (+3 more)
• ADDENDUM: Could extend the ‘sacrifice’ or ‘grafting’ essays less directly — but more relevantly, this is a strong example of finance extending into the young subject’s formation of self.

Broader Connections

• Finance operates as a disciplinary mechanism that mobilizes debt to exploit labor. #expands (0.85) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 58
• Higher education now produces skills instead of ideals or emancipation. #expands (0.82) — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 359
• Controlling a person’s thinking through education can substitute for coercion. #expands (0.80) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 867
• Banking education deliberately produces students adapted to the oppressor’s world #qualifies (0.72) — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 218