The average student debt hovers somewhere around $24,000, and one in ten college graduates owes $40,000 or more. Extruded into a lethargic job market, debt-saddled grads enjoy little hope of making their monthly payments. Last year, the dearth of jobs forced 320,000 post-collegiates into default. Between 2008 and 2011, the college diploma, that veritable golden fleece of middle-class striving, had become a millstone. Increasingly, it has been women who have had this millstone forced around their necks, and the misfortune of this event achieves added poignancy when you consider that women’s educational triumphs had come during a period of chauvinist retrenchment. 

- Christine Baumgarthuber, “Get Thee to a University” 

Excerpted from The New Inquiry Magazine, No. 1: Precarity ($2 to subscribe)

Image by William Vanderson, 1936