I’m not a huge fan of Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, even though Jonah will benefit. This program doesn’t solve the massive problems with our higher education system. It doesn’t benefit young people who can’t go to college at all, but would like to attend training programs and or get therapy for a disability that keeps them out of the workforce. People who saved for their kids’ college or purposely chose cheaper colleges are mad. Working class folks are really pissed. I think this program will end up being very unpopular.
What do you think about Biden Student Loan Forgiveness Policy?
Apt. 11d 
My rural state university is about 50% first gen, about 40% Black and Latino/a, and a lot of working to middle class rural kids. I would put fewer than 5-10% of them at or above the upper middle class. Most of them take out loans, including the large number that never graduate (a whole other story, but the reasons are often financial). A lot of them major in things like accounting or nursing. The loans are nowhere near as big as at a private college, but most students still need them. So debt forgiveness will help our students.
They have working class families who are often very proud of them. Ten or fifteen people might show up to cheer them on at graduation – grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins. It’s an awesome thing to see. So those “working class folks” – the grads and their families – may or may not be upset.
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I’m not totally on board: If I had to design a program myself, I’d have a lower income cap (or at least do something graduated) and would also include the option for bankruptcy. And obviously I’d rather have had the money available to start with so everyone could make their college choices based on that.
But it’s important to be clear that this is not a program for “elites.” Per a Pew survey, about 38% of Americans 25 and older have a bachelors, but another 10-11% have an associates (often focusing on what we would call the trades) and another 15% have some college. 40% of “college students” are at community colleges and graduate on average with $13,000 of debt. (from this piece from Slate, which talks about the ordinariness of forgiving debt: https://slate.com/business/2022/08/student-loan-forgiveness-long-history-debt.html).
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“This program doesn’t solve the massive problems with our higher education system. It doesn’t benefit young people who can’t go to college at all, but would like to attend training programs and or get therapy for a disability that keeps them out of the workforce.”
So what? It wasn’t trying to do those things. It won’t directly harm anyone and will instead benefit a lot of people.
And actually, you are wrong. People who go to training programs do take out federal loans, so Biden’s student debt relief *will* help them. See here: https://www.thebalance.com/financial-aid-for-trade-schools-how-it-works-4780844
You can get federal aid for cosmetology school to get your license:
https://salonschools.ohiostate.edu/how-to-pay-for-cosmetology-school/
If Americans could get their heads out of their asses and realize that they don’t have to live their lives worrying about people getting something they don’t “deserve,” we’d live in a pretty nice country.
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Thanks for looking up that information on trade schools, Wendy; I thought that was the case but wasn’t sure.
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Sorry, that was me, af. Also: I found a reference to the point about the 14% of Americans who have some college in The New Republic: “a lot of working-class people carry a lot of student debt. More than one-third of college enrollees have not received their diplomas after six years, and few in this group ever will. Working-class college dropouts are left in the worst possible circumstance, with a heavy load of student debt and no college degree to help them work it off. Unsurprisingly, their default rate is triple what it is for people with college degrees. Default is no escape because the government can garnish the defaultee’s wages. Biden’s plan will help them.”
Sometimes people drop out because we flat-out have failed them. Colleges are very aware of this and doing backflips to get retention and completion rates up (sometimes for good reasons, sometimes it’s just to make ourselves look better in the stats). But a lot of people are either okay with some college – they realize a year or two in that they don’t need it to do what they want, or that they don’t know what they want to do, and don’t feel like paying for it – or they get into a financial bind and can’t make it work. A parent loses a job; they have to help take care of older relatives or younger siblings – they are part of their family’s financial and social support system in a way that most middle/UMC kids aren’t. By this point, at a state college they easily may have taken out $5 or $10k in loans.
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None of the programs that I was researching for Ian – job training/independent living/therapy/college support for disabled people – were eligible for student loans. They were minimum of $80K out of pocket.
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Aren’t community college classes available for student loans? Though potentially those loans would interact with disability benefits in a way that makes them inaccessible to people claiming disability? A real question because I don’t know. Do you have to be enrolled for a certain number of units to get student loans?
I did learn from you that the post-college residential programs aren’t eligible for the loans/grants used for college.
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Community college is not really accessible for most people with disabilities. Ian took one class and needed tons of support from me (not with content). Most of his peers could not do what he did. They need very specialized programs, which aren’t recognized as places of higher education and are thus not eligible for loans. Loans for community college would have no impact on disability benefits. (There aren’t many benefits for disabled people who could handle community college.)
The government just gave one of my kids $10,000 and has nothing for the other kid. This hardly seems fair.
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The problem to me seems to be that the job training/independent living programs for Ian and others are not eligible for student loans – or don’t get subsidized in a major way under disability support services. That’s bad, and should be changed.
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There are lots of things that aren’t fair in life. There are lots of things about governments and other institutions that aren’t fair. The problem of debt is a big issue, and to complain that one policy that helps a lot of people isn’t “fair” because it doesn’t help some people just seems petulant. Is it fair that I lived in NY state for 27 years and paid taxes there for 10 of those years and yet my kids weren’t eligible for in-state tuition at the NY state schools they attended/attend? Who cares? It is what it is and overall I think in-state tuition at SUNYs is a great thing.
You are absolutely right that we as a society need to do better for disabled people and education. I doubt there is anyone reading this blog who thinks otherwise. But should we not have passed ADA or IDEA because it wasn’t enough?
Is it a cash dump? Yes, of course! Cash is important. Less debt is important. I looked at the article bj mentioned and the generation with the most debt is aged 25 to 34. The 34 year olds were born in 1988 and were 18 in 2006. They graduated into the Great Recession and have been pretty much f****d since then. Yes, I think we owe it to as many of them as possible to make their lives a little easier.
I don’t know why people are losing their minds over student debt relief, but I am kind of done with it. It really just makes the opponents of student debt relief look both illogical and uncompassionate, which is not a great look. And I think we could address the concerns of working class people that they are paying for other people’s college by instituting higher taxes on the f****ing superrich who got that way by exploiting the working classes and middle classes.
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I have lots of things I think should change about the financing of higher education, too. But none of those fixes are politically feasible as long as the filibuster prevents policy at the federal level. The debt forgiveness was something under Biden’s control (folks say there might still be lawsuits trying to prevent it, but, like presidential pardons, he had authority to do it under the student debt law). And, for me simpler beats complicated attempts to direct the forgiveness more strategically for me.
I retreat from the shift in thinking that education of a person is a personal benefit and not one that benefits all of us. I want more government spending and more corporate contributions to the workforce they want to see trained and less weighting of debt on individuals. And, I hope there will be the political will, someday, to limit the maximum borrowing and to better regulate for profit institutions.
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I like the program in the sense that it does something good instead of doing nothing waiting for a perfect plan. It will really help a lot of people who have college debt and yet still low paying jobs. It also doesn’t waste a lot of money on someone who foolishly spent 200k on a MFA or doctors who can pay off their own loans with higher income. It helps a lot of people for the amount of money.
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I liked this article at the WashPost, telling me who has different levels of debt by age (gift link, so it should work for everyone): https://wapo.st/3AsPlFe
I think it would be interesting to dig down at the data, both qualitatively and quantitatively. For example, a conversation between Gen Z student & Gen X parent would be fascinating. I do have an instinct that the debt feels more weighty for Gen Z & millennials who do not have stable economics in their own families (i.e. parents or parent). When I took loans, as a Gen X’er (the official years make me Gen X now), I knew I had parents I could bunk with as needed. Without that backstop, the burden would have felt heavier.
I do not trust my knowledge on “popularity”, but I know that I do know that I am far more fussed that the carried interest loophole saves a hedge fund manager (or whatever they call themselves) making $1,000,000 at least $85,000 (which is almost enough to buy a Tesla Model S). And, yes, that is money they “earned” (but, not any more than the million dollar earner who is a doctor, a lawyer, or a soccer player, and of course, it’s an even bigger benefit if folks earn more). I’ve always thought that people are weirdly focused on people who are relatively poor when they complain about the fairness of benefits.
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Yeah that really ticks me off.
One thing not often discussed is the cost of health insurance to college students. Most schools require it, and a lot of students my wife works with fall into a complicated hole of being still claimed as dependents on their parents’ taxes, limiting their eligibility for public programs . So they end up buying the university plan which in Colorado here averages around $3000 annually. If they graduate in 4 years that’s 12k without even covering tuition.
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Marianne, I don’t quite understand this. Why aren’t these kids on their parents’ insurance if they are dependents?
Our 20yo gets a health insurance waiver every year because he’s covered by ours.
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Wendy, these families are uninsured or on Medicaid. Some parents are undocumented. The rules for getting Medicaid if you are a college student are complicated and often students aren’t eligible if their parents are claiming them. Depends upon your state too.
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The explanation is an example of how we can’t just assume that other children can do what our children can (or what we did). Our kids are also on our health plan, but the plan doesn’t cover the areas on the other side of the country they are going to college. So we pay for the school based insurance (not looking for sympathy — we can afford it, though as with any spending it does mean less money to spend on other things).
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I can’t comment on the wisdom of this policy and I get that there was limited ability to enact legislation. But I do think subsidized/means-tested/caps on tuition overall is better than loan forgiveness. However something is better than nothing.
I went to school in Canada in the 90s and so my annual tuition was $1200. (Not missing a zero.) As a result, although dorm + airfare was around $10k, I was able to work and use some funds from my grandparents and not-quite-graduate with zero debt. My husband was in a religious order but they were willing/able to pay for his undergrad and graduate tuition because it was relatively low (he lived in the order, nearish to the campus.) As a result of that we were able to get married and buy a fixxer-upper a year later in the mid-90s and then contribute to the economy via endless trips to Home Depot. 🙂
Our support for people with disabilities also sucks really a lot. Here it’s different budget lines, not sure about it there.
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“But I do think subsidized/means-tested/caps on tuition overall is better than loan forgiveness.”
The federal government in the US doesn’t control tuition. They can limit the amount borrowed (and do limit the amounts borrowed for undergraduate education).
States subsidize their public universities with lower tuition and some offer a form of “tuition capping” by offering aid to lower income students. In Washington state, that’s called the “husky promise” at the flagship, University of Washington: “The Husky Promise guarantees full tuition and standard fees will be covered by grant or scholarship support for eligible Washington state students.” for Pell grant eligible students (pell grats would not cover tuition at UW).
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Yeah…my mum went to SUNY-Albany and my dad to Brown/Cornell so I know it is really different.
Here there are caps on undergrad (if universities want funding, which they do) – not for some specialities or grad schools so those programs are different. In Ontario currently I think the cap is around $15,000/year. Prior to our current Conservative government, students in families that made less than 50,000 also could receive free tuition, briefly, but that was yanked away – one of my extended family members got caught in that midway through his program. This does, however, increase the incentives for universities to admit a lot of foreign students as the cap doesn’t apply to them…you get some wonky stuff going on.
Also our universities are not as ah…gleaming. Our dorms are basic. Etc. Much less competition – we only have something like 225 universities in the country total including the small private ones.
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I just feel like this is a huge arbitrary cash drop. Now, I have no problem with a cash drop for people under a certain income line. I don’t get why we are only helping college students. Lots of people who never attended college have huge debt loads; they used their credit cards to pay for rent and food. Why aren’t we helping them?
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Again, I really do think we are “only helping college students” (and attendees and former attendees at colleges, training programs, and graduate programs) is that loan forgiveness is under the President’s control and other help isn’t. This is the cash assistance (and not really, since it is forgiveness of money that was already spent) that was under the president’s power.
We weren’t able to pass the child credit, for example or the child care subsidies which might have helped people other than those accessing post K-12 education.
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I don’t understand how it’s a cash drop. It’s not as if each of these people is literally getting a $10k check; in fact due to the payment pause during the pandemic, most of them will literally see no difference right now. It’s just that when the payment pause is over, they won’t have to resume making those payments.
Note that I am not getting any benefit here. I dropped out of college in the early 1980s without any debt and without a degree.
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