Rachel Cohen, education reporter extraordinaire, interviewed me following the release of the latest Mapping Student Debt map and analysis, which show that the student debt crisis disproportionately impacts minorities, and among minorities, the middle class. Our conversation ranged well beyond that, though, encroaching on both the failure of the "skills gap" and Skills-Biased Technical Change and what I consider the root cause of rising inequality: taxes on the rich are too low, which makes running and/or owning an ultra-profitable corporation very much worth doing. When top marginal tax rates were 90%, no point in squeezing workers and customers to pad the paychecks of CEOs and the dividend streams of rentiers.
Anyway, debt-financed higher education is not the solution to individual or group inequality, and that mistaken diagnosis has caused all manner of harmful treatment effects.
