The politics of student loan in Turkey: regimenting the youth through authoritarian debtfarism

ABSTRACTThe mass-scale expansion of student loan schemes in Turkey over the last two decades has been accomplished by a governance technique which the article defines as authoritarian debtfarism. By restructuring the Credit and Dormitories Institution (KYK) as subordinated to the executive and insulated from democratic intervention, the authoritarian neoliberal state in Turkey has sought to fulfil its new economic function, i.e. enabling the societal reproduction of the youth by increasing their financial dependency on credit money. The state-led student loan expansion in Turkey emerged in a tuition-free higher education setting without a sophisticated financial infrastructure and in an economic environment marked with perpetual graduate unemployment as well as inflationary pressures on repayment amounts. Based on a detailed interrogation of the official documents and in-depth interviews with defaulters, this article argues that authoritarian debtfarism has imposed a rigid market discipline over the university youth by using non-transparency and arbitrariness as its governance mechanisms. Consequently, future labour of the graduates is put on hold through a long-term debt relation, compelling them to integrate into labour market precariously as a new segment of the relative surplus population.KEYWORDS: Student loan politicsTurkeyauthoritarianismdebthigher education AcknowledgementsI am thankful for the feedback received on a previous version of this paper, which was presented at the 17th National Social Science Congress organised by the Turkish Social Sciences Association in February 2023. The author expresses gratitude to Susanne Soederberg, Canan Şahin, and Rebecca Hall for their valuable feedback.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Like Turkey, China, India and Brazil experienced a rapid increase in their gross enrollment rates. To illustrate, from 2001 to 2021, the GER increased from 8 to 64 per cent in China, from 10 in to 31 per cent in India and from 21 to 55 per cent in Brazil (Ziderman Citation2023, World Bank Citation2023a). This trend was accompanied with the expansion of student loans, with 30 per cent of the total university students taking loans in China (Yang Citation2017), 26 per cent in India (Chalil Citation2021), 40 per cent in Brazil (Lavinas et al. Citation2019) and 27 per cent in Turkey (see Figure 2). The reason why time reference for these countries is not standardised is a lack of data regarding the countries mentioned.2 While accurate default rates are unavailable, non-performing assets rose in the late 2010s, which reaches one-third in some states of India (Chalil Citation2021, p. 128) and 30 per cent in some underdeveloped regions in China (Cai et al. Citation2019, p. 98), 47 per cent in Brazil (Lavinas et al. Citation2019).3 The data is retrieved from the same source used for Figure 2. Please see the endnote 14.4 These figures have been computed using data from TUIK's 2022 fourth-quarter statistics and İŞKUR's January 2023 statistics, as compiled by the ‘Young Unemployed’ platform. This initiative, comprising social scientists, aims to support and connect unemployed youth by providing monthly data insights. Available from https://gencissizler.org/2023/02/17/genc-issizlik-bulteni-subat-2023/ [Accessed 10 May 2023].5 I computed the student debt to GDP ratio annually using ‘lending amounts’ (code 08) from CoA reports on KYK and Ministry of Youth and Sports. In contrast to highly financialized student loan systems in the Global North, where rising default rates have a contagion effect on the economy due to large student loan portfolios to GDP ratios,,with 6.5 per cent in the US (Kirney and Tanzş Citation2022) and 5.5 per cent in the UK (Keep and Bolton Citation2018), neither the amount of student loan to GDP ratio, 0.097 per cent by 2021, nor the volume of default rates would create a disastrous effect on the Turkish economy (The amount of student loan to GDP ratio is following: 0.15126 per cent in 2013; 0.22972 per cent in 2014; 0.15958 per cent in 2015; 0.21313 per cent in 2016; 0.18894 per cent in 2017; 0.17115 per cent 2018; 0.16144 per cent 2019; 0.13714 per cent in 2020; 0.09662 per cent in 2021).6 Koç, Sabancı, Özyeğin, and Yaşar universities are established and privately owned by influential members of TUSIAD.7 The author’s new research is on the link between massification project and sub-national development outside the traditional urban centres. The referenced book is a thoroughly documented journalistic account detailing students’ experiences and the difficulties they encounter in local exploitative economies.8 The number of foundation universities which are privately funded has also increased almost threefold from 26 to 79 between 2005 and 2022.Given that the primary focus of the article is on the connection between the growth of public universities and student loan systems developed for the students from low-income background, discussions concerning private universities have been deliberately omitted.9 New universities founded after 2006 have an annual capacity of 223,082, according to OSYM. Multiplying this by the 4-year average completion time in higher education estimates a total of one million.10 For the AKP government, the Ziraat Bank became an essential financial public asset for expanding consumer and housing credits giving the government an ability to control the interest rates. It is also used as a resource for cheap credit to small and medium-sized enterprises and for the AKP government's mega-projects (Marois and Güngen Citation2013, Akçay and Güngen Citation2019).11 Although access to Court of Accounts reports prior to 2014 is unavailable, the available data paints a concerning picture of a repayment crisis: The outstanding receivables amounted to 936 million dollars in 2014, 812 million dollars in 2015, 1409 million dollars in 2016, 1422 million dollars in 2017, 1794 million dollars in 2018, 1322 million dollars in 2019, 2314 million dollars in 2020, and 2707 million dollars in 2021.12 This illustrative case of the rapidly increasing student loan repayment amount is sourced from the Twitter account of KYK debtors. Available from: https://twitter.com/kykborclulari/status/1546566636978802692/photo/1.Additional informationFundingThe author acknowledges the financial support provided by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) during her postdoctoral research at the Global Development Studies Department at Queen's University in Kingston.Notes on contributorsHavva Ezgi DogruHavva Ezgi Doğru is a political scientist with a PhD from York University, Canada. She is a faculty member in the Department of Sociology at Anadolu University and currently a visiting scholar in the Development Studies Department at Queen's University. Her academic interests and publications focus on political economy, state theories, and urbanization.