Student debt in the United States has grown $650 billion over the last nine years, standing now at around $996 billion according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. For some perspective, $996 billion could pay the full tuition for 4,091,486 students to graduate from Harvard Law School. Student debt is now bigger than both outstanding credit card debt and debt from auto loans in the nation.

DePaul Students for Justice and its parent organization Illinois Indiana Regional Organizing Network (IIRON) held a public meeting at the Chicago Temple April 13 to raise awareness of the student debt epidemic in the United States and to promote their platform to combat the crisis. The meeting attracted around 500 students and other members of the Chicago community, completely filling the venue. Following the public meeting, a delegation of students also traveled to Washington D.C., April 20 to lobby their platform and take part in actions organized by National People’s Action.

IIRON is made up of five organizations from different campuses throughout Chicago. The organization is represented in Loyola, North Park, University of Illinois Chicago, University of Chicago and DePaul University. 

“Many of our universities have been running like Wall Street corporations,” said Dylon Busser, a member of the IIRON who chaired the public meeting.

Throughout the meeting, speakers pointed to the corporatization of universities as a cause for increase in student debt and the raising of tuition.

“We are the leaders we have been waiting for,” said Briana Tong, a University of Chicago student who spoke at the public meeting. “Today we have solutions.”

The IIRON platform is called the “ReNew Deal” and focuses on creating jobs, relieving student debt and protecting the planet.

To accomplish these goals, the group has put its support behind a tax transparency bill in Illinois and behind the student loan and fairness act H.R. 1330. The tax transparency bill attempts to make corporate tax returns more visible to the public, as well as give the government some teeth to take back subsidies from companies that fail to create jobs.  H.R. 1330 works to create what it calls a 10-10 standard, where federal student loan debt would be forgiven after 10 years of a recipient paying 10 percent of their discretionary income toward the debt.

The presidents and administration officials from each school were invited to the meeting – none of them attended, however.

“Because (Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider, C.M.) was unable to attend due to previously scheduled commitments, he asked whether someone in Student Affairs might be able to do so,” said Cynthia Lawson, the vice president for public relations and communications for DePaul, responding to the absence of the DePaul administration from the meeting.

The administration official could not attend due to unexpected family reasons. 

“We are challenging their empire and they don’t like it,” said Elizabeth Scrafford, a DePaul student and member of DePaul Students for Justice, referring to universities.  “We need to hold administrators to their promises to listen to our voices.”

Scrafford also said that in a meeting with Fr. Holtschneider, he twice called education an industry. The response from the crowd was a resounding chant of “that ain’t right.”

“(Industry) is not a word that I use all that often, but when I do, it’s usually when I am referring to higher education in a broader context – the collective group of public, private, Catholic and other religious and for-profit universities,” said Holtschneider, regarding his comment.

“DePaul supports policy changes designed to reduce the burden of student indebtedness,” said Lawson, when asked if DePaul would support the ReNew Deal Platform. “We will closely monitor the reauthorization debate and seek to ensure that any new policies are fair to students, promote choice in higher education, maintain academic freedom and make college more affordable without diminishing the quality of higher education.”

While in Washington, D.C., representatives from IIRON took part in several actions including a demonstration where they demanded the resignation of Ed Demarco, the director of the federal housing and finance, and met with Congressman Bobby Rush (the representative for the first district in Illinois) and Undersecretary of Education Martha Kanter. A portion of the students was also able to sit in on the Senate congressional hearing on immigration.

While meeting with Rush, the students were able to get him to sign H.R. 1330. H.R. 1330 is currently in the House Education and Workforce committee in addition to the Committees on Financial Services and Ways and Means. In addition to Rush, Congresswoman Joyce Beatty and Congressman Michael Honda also co-sponsored the bill April 23. The bill now has 46 cosponsors.