Higher education in the US has increasingly become too expensive for most students to afford. In part, this change began in the 1960s, when future president Ronald Reagan led a campaign against higher education in California, believing it was a breeding ground for liberal ideas, which is precisely what Ken Ilgunas expected from his Duke University experience. Reagan’s plan involved cutting funding to higher education, arguing that the increased cost of tuition would be paid in the form of student loans, assuming that students would pay back these loans with the salaries they earned in jobs that made use of a degree. Beginning in the late 1960s, as these policies took hold across the country, students began taking out millions of dollars in loans to pay for their educations. In the 1980s, these loans had expanded into the billions, but the economy of the 1980s allowed most students to get sufficient salaries after graduation to pay back their loans.

Through the 1990s and into the present, student costs and consequent debt have increased astronomically, leading to the situation that Ilgunas describes in Walden on Wheels, in which most students graduate facing insurmountable debt and little to no hope of securing a job capable of paying it off.