Hi all! This is happening on Friday 12/7, at 4pm at the GC Room 5414. Come if you can!!!
The International Committee of the PSC/CUNY, would like to invite you to join us this Friday, December 7th at 4 PM in Rm 5414 of the Graduate Center. We look forward to collaborating with interested CUNY graduate students and faculty to plan for a March 2013 one-day conference on the crisis of student debt, resistance to the debt and the impact of student debt on future student employment decision-making and the potential of lurking unemployment and deepening debt challenges.
This is a preliminary organizational meeting to plan for the conference’s direction, themes, and participants and we are looking to the critical input from interested CUNY graduate students and faculty. The tentative conference title would be “Student Resistance to Debt and Unemployment.”
We want it to have both a CUNY and a US focus as well as an invitation to one or another foreign student leader to bring in a comparative international context regarding privatization and austerity in higher education elsewhere. However, we are also keen on assessing the increasing challenges of rising college tuition and the mounting debt crisis among US undergraduate and graduate students that impacts on their future lives and working goals.
Like mortgages and credit card debt, students are tied to educational debt that always accompanies them in the marketplace. Students are ineligible for bankruptcy protection and future salaries can be garnished and income tax refunds seized. Additionally most student loan paybacks are in arrears so they are accumulating compounded interest plus penalty fees. These factors can have a severe impact on students finding employment of choice.
As student debt repayments are financialized and repackaged we see connections between the neo-liberal economic project and the role of financially dependent students in American society. We see student debt as having a deleterious impact on university curriculum development and the subsequent reverberations on society, social structure, and the kind of educated students we need to confront injustice and inequity through critical thinking.