Winehole23
01-01-2021, 09:42 PM
This is what disinvestment in higher education looks like.
Sign of our financialized, neofeudal world.
One day in 2017, Simien was riding the BART train when he saw an ad for the Holberton School, a for-profit technology training program. Holberton had plastered the stations with posters that said things like ivy league salaries and no up-front tuition and become a software engineer in 2 years or less. The ads featured flattering photos of people who looked like Simien’s friends from Ingleside: twentysomething African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos. They were all grinning.
Within days, Simien had submitted Holberton’s online application for a two-year course in software engineering, which required that he complete some basic computer-literacy exercises and write an essay about his interest in the school. The last step was signing an income-share agreement (ISA), which is how Holberton was able to accept students for its $85,000 program without requiring any payment up front. The ISA entitled the school to a stake in Simien’s future earnings. Once he graduated and started making more than $40,000 a year, he would owe the school 17 percent of each paycheck until he paid back the tuition or until he hit the cap of forty-two months.
To Simien, it seemed straightforward: “I printed it out and read it,” he told me. “On the top, it says, ‘This is not a loan.’ ” But though he didn’t realize it at the time, Simien’s signature had transformed him into a financial product. Unlike a traditional loan, the ISA was directly tied to Simien’s performance in the labor market—the more money he made, the more money he owed. That stream of income could then be packaged, bundled, and sold to investors, launching Simien into the Rube Goldberg machine of American finance.
https://harpers.org/archive/2020/12/skin-in-the-game-wall-street-student-debt-crisis/
Sign of our financialized, neofeudal world.
One day in 2017, Simien was riding the BART train when he saw an ad for the Holberton School, a for-profit technology training program. Holberton had plastered the stations with posters that said things like ivy league salaries and no up-front tuition and become a software engineer in 2 years or less. The ads featured flattering photos of people who looked like Simien’s friends from Ingleside: twentysomething African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos. They were all grinning.
Within days, Simien had submitted Holberton’s online application for a two-year course in software engineering, which required that he complete some basic computer-literacy exercises and write an essay about his interest in the school. The last step was signing an income-share agreement (ISA), which is how Holberton was able to accept students for its $85,000 program without requiring any payment up front. The ISA entitled the school to a stake in Simien’s future earnings. Once he graduated and started making more than $40,000 a year, he would owe the school 17 percent of each paycheck until he paid back the tuition or until he hit the cap of forty-two months.
To Simien, it seemed straightforward: “I printed it out and read it,” he told me. “On the top, it says, ‘This is not a loan.’ ” But though he didn’t realize it at the time, Simien’s signature had transformed him into a financial product. Unlike a traditional loan, the ISA was directly tied to Simien’s performance in the labor market—the more money he made, the more money he owed. That stream of income could then be packaged, bundled, and sold to investors, launching Simien into the Rube Goldberg machine of American finance.
https://harpers.org/archive/2020/12/skin-in-the-game-wall-street-student-debt-crisis/