| Image by Elaine J.E. Degale
The Fine Print on the American Dream
On February 23, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr famously proclaimed: “Everybody is on welfare in this country. The problem is that we all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor.” According to Matthew Desmond’s Poverty by America, the United States spent $1.8 trillion on tax breaks for wealthy families in 2021. That amount exceeded total spending on law enforcement, education, housing, healthcare, diplomacy, and everything else that makes up our discretionary budget.
The Trump administration announced this week that it will be seizing the wages, tax returns, and pensions of those who have been unable to repay federal student loans. “Debt cannot be wiped away; it just ends up being transferred to others. So why should Americans who didn’t go to college, or went to college and responsibly paid back their loans, pay for the student loans of other Americans?” asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday.
It’s strange to have a communist perspective on student loan debt but significantly ignore collective debt when it comes to funding wars in the Middle East. In this recent political spectacle orchestrated by America’s authoritarian regime, education has become the main event. On one corner, Jeffersonian idealists dream of colleges as public goods, secular sanctuaries for curious minds and civic virtue. On the other hand, Hamiltonian realists believe schools should be pipelines for productivity and prestige — training camps for the capitalist gladiator games.
The current neoliberal order thrives on selling everyone the American Dream, while devising a superstructure that captures us in a false consent to undertake crushing debt to attend the “best” colleges that will boost our marketability in the capitalist order. We are in chains by the financial burden of repaying a loan that was promoted by the neoliberal order as a guaranteed pathway to economic success. The catch? Well, all we had to do was get into the best schools, compete with our privileged counterparts, and religiously pray to the gods of capitalism that we had made ourselves “fortunate” enough to be granted full participation in an economic order that was designed to create competition.
We didn’t consent to this system. We were sold a dream wrapped in buzzwords: meritocracy, grit, and personal responsibility. But behind the curtain? A rigged lottery where pedigree beats potential, and where “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” only works if your boots are Gucci and your dad’s name is on a building. The neoliberal machine promises that education is the great equalizer. However, at elite universities, more students come from families in the top 1% of income earners than the entire bottom 99%.
So, who’s really earning an opportunity in America?
Capitalism’s Business Cards are College Degrees
College degrees are not obsolete, but it is immoral to make them so expensive if we genuinely desire to live in a thriving democracy. We are raised in a system that teaches us to trade passion for productivity, and curiosity for compliance. We major in what pays, not what moves us. And when the bill arrives? We’re told to suck it up, smile through the burnout, and be grateful we got invited to the hustle in the first place. As a first-generation black Filipina, do you know how many times my parents told me to be grateful for the privilege of being born an American? That people would give an arm and a leg to be in my position?
“Forgiving student debt is reparations for the dreamers—those of us who signed the dotted line, not for luxury, but for a shot at survival. It’s for the strivers who believed in merit, in hustle, in the promise that hard work would set us free. And it’s for the rest of us too—the accidental laborers of late-stage capitalism, told we were “owners” while we built empires for someone else.”
The problem is that being American doesn’t alleviate poverty; in many ways, it exacerbates it. The cost of living continues to rise, while first-generation students aim to mitigate the wealth gap with jobs that purposely underpay in the name of profit. In 2024, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the U.S. exceeded $1,600. Meanwhile, the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009.
The wealthiest democratic nation on Earth also has some of the highest poverty rates among advanced economies. Each year, the U.S. federal government funnels nearly $250 billion into housing subsidies that primarily benefit the wealthy—through tax deductions for mortgage interest, property taxes, and capital gains. This upside-down system is a hallmark of American capitalism, which praises personal responsibility while institutionalizing inequality. For first-generation college graduates, the burden is twofold: not only must they navigate an economy stacked against them, but they are also expected to become financial lifelines for their families. This “first-gen breadwinner phenomenon” turns their hard-won degrees into debts—monthly bills from the Department of Education that punish them for trying to break cycles of poverty by pursuing better job opportunities.
Many billionaires may claim that a college degree is obsolete, but the time spent in college is critical for cultivating and discovering one’s talents and interests. Additionally, research has shown that a college degree increases wealth prospects with generational effects. According to the Pew Research Center, the median household income for households headed by a first-generation college graduate is $99,600, substantially lower than that of households headed by a second-generation graduate at $135,800.
Who are the Architects of Poverty on American Soil?
What are the forces that coerced us to put ourselves in debt to participate in the freedoms we were made to believe in? The concept of meritocracy, in itself, is oppressive. It has trained us to quell our creative tendencies and serve a regimented structure of rigged competition instead. The omnipresence of wealth’s glorification instills in us the message that if we play by the rules of a rigged game, we will certainly be rewarded in kind.
But is this true? The whole education system, writ large, has been produced in service of the industrial age and needs some radical reorganization to meet the technological realities of future society. We are teaching our kids not to follow their passions and invest their energy in skills that have no value beyond monetary and security, in the same pensions currently at risk under Trump 2.0.
What about the soul? The passion? Spirituality and Love? We are being conditioned to negotiate our talents and interests in the service of money and belonging. And it’s oppressive.
Forgiving student debt is reparations for the dreamers—those of us who signed the dotted line, not for luxury, but for a shot at survival. It’s for the strivers who believed in merit, in hustle, in the promise that hard work would set us free. And it’s for the rest of us too—the accidental laborers of late-stage capitalism, told we were “owners” while we built empires for someone else. If our degrees are the keys that open doors for companies to profit from our brilliance, then let them foot the bill. We paid in sweat, in soul, in sleepless nights. The onus of paying student loan debt should fall on the companies that benefit from this economic exploitation.
Otherwise, this is indentured servitude.
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Editor’s Note: The Philippine Daily Mirror welcomes Elaine J.E.. Degale as a columnist. Ms. Degale’s column, The Dreamweaver, will appear every Thursday. Her articles will be in the guest column as her handle is being prepared. Her initial column, We Are Sub-Saharan, was published on March 23, 2025.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Elaine Joy Edaya Degale is a Black-Filipina writer and lecturer at community colleges within the City University of New York (CUNY) and has an Ed.M. and M.A. from Teachers College, Columbia University.
She graduated cum laude from Mount Holyoke College, where she studied International Relations and Development, and continues to support literacy and food programming efforts in Indigenous communities through her Community-Based organization, OperationMerienda.org.
