Few issues have vexed the Biden administration like student loan forgiveness. Given that more than 40 million Americans owe money on their student loans, for a total of $1.6 trillion, few issues have such a large impact on so many.
Democrats and progressives have long prioritized this matter, and President Joe Biden promised to fight for significant debt relief before taking office. Even though his ambitious proposal to use his executive authority to forgive $400 billion in student loan debt was ultimately blocked by the Supreme Court, this White House has nontheless made significant progress with targeted relief, and has taken another shot at an across-the-board relief proposal. Nevertheless, many middle- and lower-income borrowers in particular continue to suffer under the burden of student debt, ensuring that this issue will remain front of mind for voters come November.
RELATED STORY: Biden administration announces new round of student loan cancellation
First, let’s talk about the actual people who have borrowed this money. Members of every generation of Americans are carrying significant student loan debt, as this graphic indicates.
Female borrowers on average owe about $2,000 more than male borrowers—this gap exists right from the moment people earn their degrees, and only gets worse thanks to the gender-based inequities in pay women face. The racial gap is even starker, with the average Black college graduate carrying approximately $25,000 more debt than their white college grad counterparts. Overall, Black borrowers have to make higher average monthly loan payments.
Furthermore, more Black and Latino borrowers are having trouble making those payments, especially as 25 million borrowers owe more than they originally borrowed, including many who have made years of payments, due to the interest that accrues. Forgiving student loan debt will help Americans of every background—including the many who are still stuck making payments after they reach retirement—while also helping to close the racial wealth gap.
As for the Biden-Harris record on student loan debt, the story starts with Capitol Hill, where progressives proposed legislation in the 117th Congress that did not pass. Democrats had narrow majorities in the House and Senate, but that doesn’t mean those were progressive majorities. The question then became: What action could the White House take to forgive student loans through executive authority?
After a long period of internal debate on that question, on Aug. 24, 2022, the White House announced its wide-reaching plan. Per the Associated Press: This plan aimed to erase “$10,000 in student loan debt for those making less than $125,000 or households with less than $250,000 in income. Pell Grant recipients, who typically demonstrate more financial need, would have had an additional $10,000 in debt forgiven.”
That would have been a lot of money for a lot of people. Please note that I said “would have.” It didn’t go into effect because 10 months later, the six conservative justices on the Supreme Court voted to strike the Biden plan down as unconstitutional. So, while it’s technically true that Biden failed to deliver on his promise to provide across-the-board relief to middle- and lower-income borrowers, it’s more accurate to say that conservatives in the legislative and judicial branches prevented him from doing so.
Despite this setback, the Biden-Harris administration has, through a number of targeted cancellations of loans, forgiven a total of $153 billion in student debt, providing relief for 4.3 million Americans to the tune of approximately $35,581 per borrower. Not exactly chump change. The president explained the importance of these steps on Feb. 21.
“It’s good for the economy as a whole,” Biden said. “By freeing millions of Americans from the crushing debt of student loan programs, it means they can finally get on with their lives.”
In his in-depth look at student loan debt (which I highly recommend), John Oliver gives the White House its due for what it has accomplished:
More loan forgiveness will roll out throughout this year. This relief has come through a number of targeted measures. Approximately 40% came through changes to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program—which was so dysfunctional that, at its worst, it denied forgiveness to almost 99% of applicants, prompting the American Federation of Teachers to sue, who else, Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Biden’s changes led to help for almost 800,000 borrowers, who had an average of about $71,500 forgiven per person.
The rest of the relief is aimed at lower-income borrowers, those who attended “shady colleges that scammed hundreds of thousands of students,” and folks who are on permanent disability. Plus, the administration has just released new executive action that, it hopes, will pass Supreme Court muster this time because it relies on different legislation for its authority than the plan the court kicked to the curb last year. This new proposal, as per the administration, would:
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Cancel runaway interest for millions of borrowers.
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Automatically cancel debt for borrowers eligible for loan forgiveness under Saving on A Valuable Education, PSLF, closed school discharge, or other forgiveness programs but not enrolled.
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Cancel student debt for borrowers who entered repayment over 20 years ago.
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Cancel student debt for borrowers who enrolled in low-financial-value programs.
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Cancel student debt for borrowers experiencing hardship paying back their loans.
If allowed to go into effect, the plan would bring the total number of people whose debt was reduced or canceled by this White House to 30 million. This is a record Democrats can run on, especially if they contrast what Biden has done on student loan forgiveness to what DeVos did under Trump, which basically amounted to seeing just how few applications for relief she could grant, regerdless of whether the applicant actually qualified based on existing law.
Nevertheless, Biden, Harris, and the rest of Team Blue are going to have to make the case to voters who, in some cases at least, haven’t seen the kind of help they expected, and perhaps aren’t aware of the full extent of the debt relief that has been enacted. There appears to be no storyline the supposedly liberal mainstream media loves more than one in which people who are “supposed” to support Biden—such as young progressive voters or voters of color—are considering turning away from him, even if the number who do so turns out to be quite small in the end.
Along those lines, The New York Times interviewed activist and Debt Collective press secretary Braxton Brewington, who acknowledged the positive but remained critical and demanded more. The measures Biden has taken to cancel some debt were, in his words, “a reminder that despite the Supreme Court ruling, there are powers at the Biden administration’s disposal and they use them—but sparingly.” He added that “At this point, we’re getting closer to saying that they’ve made a dent in the portfolio, but at this scale, and at this rate, we’re still going to have a student debt crisis.”
In another Times interview a few weeks later, Brewington noted that, on this issue, the current administration had been “better than any other.” However, he’s still not convinced the Biden-Harris campaign will find much traction on student debt relief. “I get they want to talk about the work they’ve done on student debt, and I think they’re trying to have some nuance, but to a degree, it’s just not going to land with so many people. Especially when you’re saying ‘promises kept.’ I mean, good gracious.”
Another activist, Ashley Pizzuti—who is working with the White House on student debt—described in an interview with The New York Times the hurdles the president will face with some voters.
“There’s a lot of really upset people rightfully because they were told they were going to get this forgiveness and it was taken back,” she said. “And a lot of people blame Biden for that.”
Speaking of blame, ABC News interviewed 30-year-old Liam Gude, who called Biden’s proposals “an insult” and would not commit to voting for the president, even though he’s “much better than Trump.” Somewhat more sympathetic to Biden was Ashley Robinson, age 33, who owes $50,000 in student loans. She thought she’d get aid from his 2022 plan, and expressed disappointment over how it played out.
“In terms of a massive, broken promise? Yeah, I think that definitely negatively impacts how I feel toward him,” Robinson said. Despite these feelings, she said, “I’m not enthusiastic about voting, but voting is something that’s important to me. So I continue to participate.”
Going further, Robinson acknowledged the obstacles Biden faced in enacting more sweeping debt relief, adding that she knows it wasn’t “going to be a cakewalk for anyone.” She concluded that the administration is “just simply not as progressive as I’ve needed it to be. I genuinely believe that this is Biden’s best, but I don’t believe that Biden’s best is sufficient.”
But ABC did find a glimmer of hope. They spoke to Michael Stewart, who was equally well-informed about the issue and how things unfolded in Congress and the Supreme Court. In 2020, he supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries, but then backed Biden in the general election, about whom he now says, “I definitely was more excited for him four years ago but that’s because of the alternative.”
But Stewart doesn’t blame the president, saying, “I really fault him 0%. He did all he could.”
Similarly positive was the national director of the NAACP Youth and College Division, Wisdom Cole, who told the NYT that students loans were “absolutely still an issue” and shared the NAACP is hoping to recruit 300,000 volunteers to get out the vote in the Black community.
“Taking out the loans in the first place, is hardship—point blank period—and we have to get young people excited for this election,” Cole said. “And so when we see bold and progressive policies like that, we are able to ensure the turnout that we need to win.”
Student loan debt relief, despite the admirable progress this administration has made (more than any other administration, in fact), continues to be a hardship for many of our fellow Americans. Once the COVID-related pause on interest accruing came to an end last September, borrowers had to start making payments again, something they hadn’t had to do since before Biden won the 2020 election. It’s important to note, however, that the White House mandated a 12-month “on-ramp” during which “financially vulnerable borrowers who miss monthly payments during this period are not considered delinquent, reported to credit bureaus, placed in default, or referred to debt collection agencies.” Despite the administration’s best efforts, this is an issue that could potentially alienate a key segment of voters Team Blue wants to target.
Democrats must acknowledge these folks’ suffering—many of whom, as the data cited above makes clear, bear no resemblance to the right-wing stereotype of bratty, rich young people with fancy degrees supposedly looking for a handout. But members of Team Blue must also emphasize the real progress this White House has made for millions, while reminding voters that the president fought to do much more only to find his efforts blocked by conservatives in Congress and on the court. Had we elected a couple more supporters of debt relief to the Senate in 2020, we’d have gotten legislation through Congress—removing the matter from the Supreme Court’s purview—and we’d have a lot more debt relief now.
Is it a tricky balancing act to convince those voters who are angry because they believe Biden didn’t keep his promises on student loan forgiveness to back him in 2024? No question. But, as people who know the facts, we have to get out there and try.
And beyond the politics, we all need to keep pushing for changes to how our country funds higher education. People shouldn’t have to go broke—and stay broke—just to get a college diploma.
RELATED STORY: What to know about the SAVE plan, the income-driven plan to repay student loans
Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh’s Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)
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