AN NPR AND NEW YORK POST BEST BOOK OF 2021 From acclaimed Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Mitchell, the ';devastating account' (The Wall Street Journal) of student debt in America.In 1981, a new executive at Sallie Mae took home the company's financial documents to review. ';You've got to be shitting me,' he later told the company's CEO. ';This place is a gold mine.' Over the next four decades, the student loan industry that Sallie Mae and Congress created blew up into a crisis that would submerge a generation of Americans into $1.5 trillion in student debt. In The Debt Trap, Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Mitchell tells the ';vivid and compelling' (Chicago Tribune) untold story of the scandals, scams, predatory actors, and government malpractice that have created the behemoth that one of its original architects called a ';monster.' As he charts the ';jaw-dropping' (Jeffrey Selingo, New York Times bestselling author of Who Gets in and Why) seventy-year history of student debt in A
