Most of us are familiar — some 40 million of us, intimately — with the concept of student loans.
With student debt recently hitting a record $1.31 trillion and policy makers and educators searching for ways to clamp down on the rising cost of college, it’s a topic that’s hard to avoid. But for the vast majority of the history of higher education, credit, particularly from the government, wasn’t available specifically for students to pay for college.
Beginning in the Middle Ages, officials at some of the most prominent European colleges started to see the need for poorer students to find a way to finance their education, so they set up chests where students placed valuables, mostly books, as collateral to afford their school fees, according to Jenny Adams, an English professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, who has studied the chests. That system continued for about 300 years until the advent of the printing press decreased the value of books and made it easier for lenders to use a credit-based system.
Early forms of higher education financing in the U.S. began at Harvard, when the school created its first endowed scholarship in 1643, according to research by Matthew Fuller, a professor of higher education leadership at Sam Houston State University. The nation’s elites soon made supporting students of more modest means a priority. This type of funding didn’t come in the form of loans, per se, instead the benefactors expected to be prayed for in return for their generosity, Fuller said.
College funding mostly continued with this model until 1838 when Harvard created its own lending agency offering zero interest loans to students who couldn’t pay their way, according to Fuller’s research. Other Ivy League institutions soon followed suit.
By the middle of the 20th century, a growing college population and an increased national focus on higher education planted the seeds for the student loan program we have today. That began with the GI Bill, the first program to really solidify the government’s role in financing college by providing veterans of World War II with money to attend higher education. In 1958, the government began providing loans to a limited pool of students studying fields important to the nation’s defense, out of fear the country wasn’t doing enough to keep up in those sectors.
All of this momentum culminated in the Higher Education Act, which created the first government program offering loans to students regardless of their subject of study. Fast forward 50 years and borrowing for college has become the American norm; roughly 70% of bachelor’s degree recipients graduate with debt. But as lawmakers and experts look for answers to the student debt crisis, it’s important to remember that it wasn’t always this way.
Below is an illustrated history of the student loan: