The first federal student aid program in the United States, the National Defense Education Act, was signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1958 — six years before the Civil Rights Act federally ended “Jim Crow'' laws across the nation. The Higher Education Act of 1965, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, followed the Civil Rights Act, and while codified into law, American citizens and lawmakers still struggled with equality. Nick Hillman, professor in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, shares his theories on the slow progress to update federal student aid and provide relief to student loan debt.
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