James Applegate
Recent efforts by the Biden administration to forgive student-loan debt have erased billions in debt and freed many to buy homes, save for their children’s college and better prepare for retirement. (A quarter of student debt is held by people over 50).
Republican federal and state leaders have gone to court to try to block the most recent efforts to forgive debt. Let’s put aside the purely political reasons for one party trying to block a popular, vote-getting program by the president of another party.
Other rationales offered for not forgiving debt at their base appeal to our resistance to provide giveaways to undeserving, even irresponsible people. What about those who did pay for their college? Isn’t this unfair to them?
These arguments reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the causes of skyrocketing student-loan debt. Forgiving the debt of students who have gone to college at least since the 1980s is not a giveaway, it is an apology for misguided federal and state policies that have pushed the cost of college onto students and their parents, especially in public higher education.
In the 1970s, states paid 65 percent of college costs, and federal aid further added support, especially to lower-income students. That support plummeted to 30 percent by the early part of the 2000s.
The downward spiral began during the Reagan administration. Federal spending on student aid was slashed by 25 percent just between 1980 and 1985. Federal “support” for students shifted massively from direct grants to loans.
In what must seem bizarre in today’s talent-short economy, students were publicly portrayed as “tax eaters” and a “drag and drain on the American economy” not that different from “welfare queens.”
Following the federal lead, states began slashing support of higher education, forcing students to pick up 70 percent or more of the cost of college rather than the 30 percent that was the norm for decades before. This radical shift hit low-income and minority students the hardest.
College remained affordable for the well to do, still demanding a sliver of their overall income, while requiring nearly 70 percent of the income of a low-income family. The result was loans and loans on top of loans for those most in need of the college education ever-more crucial to social mobility and a middle-class life in an information economy.
So, forgiving the massive loan debt these students amassed over the last 40 years is not a “giveaway,” it is an apology for turning our backs when they were trying to do what we needed them to do to fuel our economy with increased education and talent.
The harm we have caused them over the last few decades cannot be undone. What we can do now is free them from debt bondage so they can have children, buy houses and cars, save for their children’s college and prepare for retirement. That will benefit our economy and all of us.
For the wealthy and those who received a highly subsidized college education to oppose forgiveness is cruel and economically stupid.
Education-equity advocate James Applegate, who earned his master’s and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, served as executive director of the Illinois Board of Higher Education from 2014-17.
