In this session, Debt Collective’s Julia Barnard and Jason Wozniak will unpack the roots of the current crisis, discuss current threats to our movement, and talk about the Debt Collective’s Right to Learn work to explore how we arrived at this current moment and define the work ahead. 

This session is a part of the larger Jubilee School: College for All series.

• Julia Barnard is the Director of the Higher Ed team at the Debt Collective and was the Student Loan Ombudsman and an advisor to Director Chopra at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from 2021 – 2025. At the CFPB, she led the policy development process related to federal and private education loans, which included reports related to tuition payment plans, K-12 payment platforms, college banking, and more. Additionally, she helped guide the CFPB’s strategy related to federal student loan servicers, private student lenders, and colleges. Before her time at the CFPB, Julia was a student loan team lead at the Center for Responsible Lending and a researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
• Jason Wozniak coordinates the Transformative Education and Social Change graduate program where he teaches courses focused on education philosophy, history, and social movements. Most recently, he co-authored Lend and Rule: Fighting the Shadow Financialization of Public Universities. He also teaches graduate Critical University Studies classes. His research focuses on critical theory analyses of financial debt and education theory and practice. Jason is a long-time Debt Collective member, organizer, researcher, and currently Coordinates Jubilee School.