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"The Student Loan Mess: How Good Intentions Created a Trillion-Dollar Problem"

Aired on Thursday, July 10th.

Could America's current student loan debt --- which now exceeds $1 trillion and is predicted to reach $2 trillion by 2020 --- somehow become the sequel to the mortgage meltdown? Some economists think it's possible. Our guest on this edition of ST is Eric Best, an Assistant Professor of Emergency Management at Jacksonville State University. Along with his father, sociologist Joel Best of the University of Delaware, Eric is the co-author of "The Student Loan Mess: How Good Intentions Created a Trillion-Dollar Problem" (University of California Press). As Eric asserts on our program, we as a nation are now facing a dire economic crisis when it comes to student loans --- a crisis that's been fueled over the past few generations by concerns about deadbeat students, crushing debt, exploitative for-profit colleges, and changing attitudes about the purpose and/or value of a college education.

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
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