UC Merced

A growing body of research shows how administrative burdens for receiving social benefits act as rationing policies that reduce access to resources through enacting learning, compliance, or psychological costs on those seeking resources. Burdens are commonly enacted through policies, paperwork, and procedural steps that beneficiaries go through to gain access to resources. Parallel research has shown the growth of inequalities from the increasing financialization of social benefits through their management according to financial logics or the delivery as loan-based benefits. This paper integrates these recent theoretical advances regarding inequalities in social and educational programs by theorizing institutional student debts as financialized administrative burdens. The paper then elaborates the theory by evaluating whether institutional student debts vary across public higher education institutions in relationship to their interrelated governance arrangements, marketization, and racialized organization.