Eleni Schirmer writes about social movements, public education, and how ordinary people create power. She has written about the rise of aging student debtors, the crisis of debt-financed education, fast-food workers’ fight for living wages, and the unfolding power of teachers’ unions, with bylines in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Nation and elsewhere. She holds a PhD from University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she wrote a political biography of the state’s largest public-sector union, the Milwaukee teachers’ union, which was awarded the Frank Zeidler Labor History award. From 2022-2025, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at Concordia University’s Social Justice Centre in Montréal, Quebec.
As a Spencer fellow, Eleni will explore the crisis of aging student debtors. In an era of declining wages, faulty relief mechanisms and compounding interest, Americans are not aging out of their debts—they are aging into them. A supposed pathway into the middle-class has snared millions into a lifetime of debt, for which death may currently be their only relief option.