Student Loans, Debtfare and the Commodification of Debt: The Politics of Securitization and the Displacement of Risk
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Student loans represent the largest and fastest growing segment of unsecured consumer debt in the US; yet, the literature is silent on the power relations of the industry. Who benefits from the expansion and reproduction of student debt to low-income students, and how? To address these questions, I explore two key features of the industry: the high level of upstream repackaging of student loan asset-backed securities (SLABS) and the high default rates. By historically contextualizing SLABS, I reveal the intrinsic political nature of the processes surrounding the commodification of debt. Through the temporal displacements inherent in the commodification of debt (i.e. accelerating the repayment schedule for lenders), SLABS serve to reduce financial risk for private lenders, whilst relocating the social dimensions of risk onto student debtors. The neoliberal state plays an integral role in attempting to mediate, discipline, and depoliticize the social fallout involved in the relocation of risk, primarily through regulatory reforms.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".