The student debt crisis in the United States has reached record highs, totaling about $1.75 trillion from 45 million borrowers. As millions of Americans await President Biden’s decision about whether to forgive at least part of this debt, Then & Now asks: how did we get to this staggering figure? How did past policy decisions pave the way for this crisis, and how and why have these decisions had a disproportionate impact on Black and Latinx students? Where do we go from here?

Dalié Jimenez, law professor at UC Irvine and Jonathan Glater, law professor at UC Berkeley, both co-founders of the  Student Loan Law Initiative at UCI, discuss findings from their 2020 article “Student Debt is a Civil Rights Issue: The Case for Debt Relief and Higher Education Reform” to shed important new light on this major national problem.