Description:

This will be a moderated discussion with President Schapiro and Professor Bruce Carruthers about the role of student loan debt in the contemporary university. How is a student's learning experience affected by the accrual of debt as an integral part of that experience? How does debt influence students’ choice of major? How might the difference between the private and public good of a college education affect how society grants and manages its student loans? How can we think about the different "rates of return" on degrees in different majors in relation to the debt they accrue?

After the moderated discussion, there will be time for a Q&A with our distinguished speakers, followed by a brief reception.

Morton Schapiro is President of Northwestern University and a professor of economics in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. He is among the nation's leading authorities on the economics of higher education, with particular expertise in the area of college financing and affordability and on trends in educational costs and student aid.

Bruce Carruthers is Director of Northwestern's Buffett Institute for Global Studies and John D. MacArthur Professor of Sociology. His current research projects include a study of the historical evolution of credit as a problem in the sociology of trust, regulatory arbitrage, what modern derivatives markets reveal about the relationship between law and capitalism, and the regulation of credit for poor people in early 20th Century America. 

Discussion will be moderated by Casey Caldwell, a PhD student in the Department of English and a Kaplan Institute Franke Fellow. Casey's dissertation research project, "The Utterance of Money: Monetary Properties in Early Modern Drama," looks at how the playhouse acted as a unique site for experimenting with material ontologies of money and alternative positive configurations of money-human relations.

This talk is co-presented by the Buffett Institute for Global Studies and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, as part of the Institute's 2016-2017 Debt Dialogue Series.