How the financial stresses of spending money on college affect the lives and well-being of middle-class family members

The battle to pay for college is one of the defining top features of middle-class life in America today. At kitchen desks all across the country, parents agonize over whether to burden their children with loans or even to sacrifice their very own financial security by firmly taking out another mortgage or draining their pension savings. Indebted requires readers in to the homes of middle-class family members about Indebted: How Family members Make College Just work at Any Cost throughout the nation to reveal the hidden consequences of student debt and the ways that funding college has transformed family life.

Caitlin Zaloom gained the self-confidence of numerous parents and their college-age children, who talked candidly with her about stressful and intensely personal financial issues that are often kept private. Within this impressive book, Zaloom describes the serious moral issues for parents as they make an effort to honor what they observe as their highest parental duty-providing their children with opportunity-and shows how parents and learners alike are forced to defend myself against enormous debts and gamble on an investment that might not pay back. What emerges is definitely a troubling portrait of an American middle income fettered from the ‘college student financing complex’-the bewildering labyrinth of government-sponsored institutions, profit-seeking firms, and school offices that gather information on home earnings and assets, assess family needs, and decide who’s eligible for aid and who’s not.

Superbly written and unflinchingly honest, Indebted breaks through the culture of silence surrounding the student debt crisis, revealing the unspoken costs of sending our children to college.