Dozens of Student Activists Arrested at Sallie Mae Sit-In

(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)Three dozen student activists were arrested Monday as more than 300 students took to the streets of DC to protest student debt. “Student debt has now reached a trillion dollars and we think that’s outrageous,” Brett Hausler, a sophomore at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst told Union City as his fellow students – in town for a United States Student Association (USSA) legislative meeting – were cuffed and arrested during a sit-in outside a downtown DC Sallie Mae office while the crowd chanted “Shame! Shame!” “I’m already $39,000 in debt and looking at $80,000 in debt when I graduate,” Hausler added. “Education is a right, not a privilege. It makes me sick to see Sallie Mae doing this.” With $172 billion in loans for over 10 million students, Sallie Mae is “the largest profiteer off of student loans,” says USSA. Students are lobbying for legislation (HR 4170) that would forgive student loan debt for millions of students who are defaulting on their loans at record rates. “We’re demanding that students get bailed out, just like the banks and corporations did,” says USSA. “If they are too big to fail, so is an entire generation of college graduates.” - report/photo by Chris Garlock