Cancel Student Loan Debt
By 
It’s very slowly starting to change, but older politicians and really older Americans generally just don’t get the overwhelming burden of student loan debt, because they didn’t experience it. When I was in college in the early 90s, I paid less than $1,000 per quarter for in-state tuition, including fees, so about $2,700 per year. The current cost of in-state tuition at the University of Oregon is $12,720 per year. At the rate of inflation since 1992, that should be just above $5,000 per year. So….that’s a huge jump and it’s completely unsustainable. The student loan industrial complex has filled the gap, but it puts students behind the 8-ball for perhaps their entire life. This has gargantuan implications on people’s lives, determining everything from whether they can ever buy a house to whether they can follow their dream job of making a difference in the world because they need to service their loans. And this is even before graduate school or, god forbid, law school loans.
The only way out of this trap is for the federal government to forgive student loans. This is a good Vox piece on the point.
“We’re drowning in the technical details and neglecting the core moral argument,” Frederick Wherry, a professor of sociology at Princeton University and the director of the Dignity and Debt Network, told me. Student loans have failed to serve their original function, instead working to hollow out the middle class or prevent access to it altogether. Substantive — if not wholescale — student loan cancellation offers an opportunity to not only acknowledge how the program has misled millions of Americans but to begin the long process of restoring access, solidity, and racial equity to the middle class. None of that can happen if we keep focusing on individual scenarios.
“There are so many dead-end conversations that we can continue to have about student debt,” Louise Seamster, a sociologist at the University of Iowa who studies race and inequity, explains. “So we have to ask ourselves, how can we talk about this differently?”
The federal student loans program was conceptualized as an equalizer, a way to allow people without financial stability to take out small amounts with low-interest or even subsidized loans, to get their foot in the door of the American dream. For millions of Americans, it made college not just accessible but imaginable. The idea was simple, and not unlike an investment in, say, a home. Whatever money you took out to cover the cost of college, whatever interest you ended up paying on the loan as you paid it off, all of it would be eclipsed by a so-called diploma bump. Sure, you were paying off debt. But you were also making a lot more money than you would have without that degree.
For years, this has been the animating theory of American student loans. They’re not a shortcut to the middle class or a cheat code, but a high-stakes workaround, a back route, a way to give yourself the bootstraps so you can actually pull yourself up by them. A half-century into this student debt experiment, we need to face a new reality. For millions of Americans, the back route has led them far, far astray.
Part of the problem, according to Seamster, is that the student loan program was intended as a wealth-building program. Like previous wealth-building programs — the mortgage assistance programs in the 1930s and the GI Bill — its beneficiaries were primarily white. Over the course of the postwar period, the white middle class expanded and solidified in part through attendance at robustly funded public institutions, with federally backed loans helping to cover the still relatively low tuition.
This path to the middle class was in place just long enough for it to seem secure: get into college, get a job, buy a house, watch your wealth grow, and then pass it along to your kids. But this was only really a safe bet if you were a white man, and when women and people of color began down the path in greater numbers, the government and taxpayers essentially stopped paying for its maintenance.
Fixing the cost of higher education is going to require radical moves with federal leadership. Until that happens, the smaller issues can’t be addressed. We are seeing declining enrollments in colleges, most notably at the community college level, demonstrating that the working classes simply are beginning to decide that it’s not worth the debt. That’s the sign of a system failing the American people and one that will soon have catastrophic impacts on institutions themselves. This needs to be a top priority of the Biden administration.