Elizabeth Tandy Shermer
(Loyola University Chicago)

May 14, 2019
4 p.m.–6 p.m. (c.t.), Philosophicum I, P207

Why do more than 44 million Americans now owe almost $1.5 trillion in student loans? Many want to blame the banks. But lenders actually fought the Senators, Representatives, and Presidents eager to make students finance their educations after World War II. Only when Congress revised the programs in the early 1970s to increase profitability did bankers embrace a financial sector that has become a pathway into poverty, not prosperity.

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer is an Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago specializing in the fields of capitalism, business, labor, political ideas and ideologies, regional development, and urbanization. Among her books and edited volumes are Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Barry Goldwater and the Remaking of the American Political Landscape (University of Arizona Press, 2013), and The Right and Labor in America: Politics, Ideology, and Imagination (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

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