Home / Lectures / Caitlin Zaloom, New York University
Indebted: Student Finance, Social Speculation, and the Future of the US Family

Caitlin Zaloom, New York University
Description
Semester:
- Winter 2022
Speakers:
Lecture Time:
Fri, March 11, 2022 @ 1:30 pm to 3:00 pm
Lecture Location:
R0220, Ross building
Speaker Webpage(s):
No speaker websites available.
Introduced By:
Lilia Cortina
Abstract
The struggle to pay for college is one of the defining features of middle-class experience in the United States today. As costs rise beyond what any could have predicted, students and parents alike agonize over whether to take on the burden of loans to try and achieve the promise of higher education. This talk will examine the hidden consequences of student debt, drawing on wide-ranging interviews with parents and students to examine how these conflicting contemporary pressures are transforming family life.
Recording & Additional Notes
Caitlin Zaloom is professor of Social & Cultural Analysis at New York University. She studies the cultural dimensions of finance, politics, technology, and economic life. Her latest book, Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost, explores how the financial pressures to pay for college affect middle-class families. Zaloom is also author of Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London, co-editor of the recent volumes The Long Year: A 2020 Reader and Antidemocracy in America, and founding editor of the Public Books, which was a 2021 finalist for a National Magazine Award. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and has been featured in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Chronicle of Higher Education among others.