All this debt so alters our national life: it amplifies inequalities. It prevents young adults from starting families, saving down payments for homes, and building wealth. It ruins credit scores and thwarts social mobility. It’s bad for everyone. We have to do something.
The economic devastation caused by the pandemic has highlighted the crisis and appears to have builds the will to do what might have been unthinkable a few years ago. A bunch of Democrats, backed by solid research, suggest we go big here, urging the Biden administration to forgive up to $ 50,000 per borrower to foster the recovery now and transform millions of lives for good. Biden doubt of his legal power at take more than $ 10,000 off people’s shoulders – even if even this modest-sounding gesture would free 15 million borrowers according to New America, a non-partisan think tank. Recent poll shows majority support for forgiving $ 50,000 for borrowers earning less than $ 125,000 per year, which seems a reasonable threshold.
However, it will take a miracle to make this great project a reality, given the dogma of one-upmanship that still prevails in much of this country. Never mind that the cost of college – today’s billion dollar bootstraps – was so much lower when many congressional Republicans and other pontifiers arrived.
But even if that did happen, which would be spectacular, we’d still be back here before long. Because wiping out existing debt doesn’t do much to fix what got us here in the first place. Tuition fees have reached criminal heights in this country. In the 1970s, the average price of a four-year private college education was only a few thousand dollars a year; now it’s about $ 50,000 per year, an increase that far exceeded inflation.
At the time, higher education was seen as a public good, which was worth the investment because it benefits everyone, said Thomas shapiro, Professor of Law and Public Policy at the Heller School, Brandeis University. Once these institutions opened up more to women and students of color, however, this commitment faltered.
Federal and state governments have decided that higher education is no longer so important, reduce school funding who then felt compelled to increase tuition fees. Meanwhile, Pell grants and other types of aid have stagnated. Which meant more, and bigger, loans for students increasingly unable to find the stupid amounts of money now required every year, even at public universities – loans that amount to “wealth extraction” and to worsening racial inequalities, Shapiro said.
If we don’t fix this, Shapiro said, “we’ll be back here,” reaching the next crisis point faster than the decades it has taken us to reach this one. What is the value of freeing someone from massive debt if their children have to shoulder a similar burden?
What we need to do to prevent this from giving the impression that canceling the $ 50,000 loan is easy: a return to the notion of higher education as a common good and federal funding commensurate with that commitment; public universities accessible and sufficiently well funded to give private schools serious competition; better and more efficient financial aid, including Pell Grants which reduce tuition fees appropriately; and free community colleges for those in need, to make these schools the first step they were always meant to be.
“It’s a tough pull,” Shapiro conceded.
But the pandemic has made it clearer than ever that we are all in the same boat. Many more of us are aware of our connections – and our commitments – to each other these days. Who would have imagined, just a year or two ago, that so many people would be open to the idea of to erase the debts of millions of people?
Why not aim even higher than that?
Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @GlobeAbraham.
