Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost Audiobook (Free)

The way the financial stresses of spending money on college affect the lives and well-being of middle-class families

The struggle to pay for college is one of the defining features of middle-class life in the us today. At kitchen tables all across the country, parents agonize over whether to burden their kids with loans or even to sacrifice their own financial security by taking out a second mortgage or draining their pension savings. Indebted requires readers into the homes of middle-class family members about Indebted: How Households Make College Just work at Any Price throughout the nation to reveal the hidden consequences of pupil debt as well as the ways that funding college has changed family life.

Caitlin Zaloom gained the 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. In this amazing book, Zaloom explains the deep moral issues for parents as they try to honor what they find as their highest parental duty-providing their children with opportunity-and displays how parents and learners alike are pressured to take on enormous debts and gamble on an investment that may not pay off. What emerges is a troubling family portrait of the American middle class fettered by the ‘student financing complex’-the bewildering labyrinth of government-sponsored institutions, profit-seeking companies, and university or college offices that collect information on household earnings and resources, assess family needs, and decide who is 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 kids to college.