Consider This from NPR - Student Debt Is Weighing Americans Down. Here's How Biden May Address It

Episode Date: November 27, 2020

Student loans can crush an individual. And when a lot of people have more debt than they can handle, the effects ripple into the larger economy. Judith Scott-Clayton, an associate professor at Columbia University, discusses the economic impact of the $1.6 trillion Americans collectively owe in student debt. President-elect Joe Biden and some members of Congress have proposed different ways to erase some amount of student debt across the board. NPR's Anya Kamenetz explains the likelihood of those proposals actually working out. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Renee Allen and her mother are about two decades apart in age, and they have something in common. My mother is in her late 50s. She is still paying off her student loans and likely could be for the rest of her life. Allen is a law professor in Brooklyn. She finished school more than a decade ago, and still she owes more than $250,000 in student loans for undergrad and law school. I am nowhere close to making a dent in mine, and I'm in a position where I will be paying for the rest of my life. So, just as her mother's debt forced Alan to take out loans,

my ability to help my future children through school are limited. And so the cycle then continues. She's one of 44 million people in America with student debt, $1.6 trillion in total. Many feel like they'll be paying it back forever. I did receive some scholarship money and I received grant money. I worked two jobs most of the time I was in undergrad and that still wasn't

enough to make ends meet. Now, members of Congress and President-elect Joe Biden have been talking about different plans to help people like Renee Allen. A lot of those plans involve some amount of debt cancellation, just wiping away part of the money people owe. For me, student loan debt cancellation means that the next generation have an opportunity to start with a clean slate, something I didn't have, something my mom didn't have. Consider this. While politicians say they're ready to address the student debt crisis,

they haven't agreed on how to do it. And while the numbers keep growing, that debt can weigh down the economy. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Friday, November 27th. This message comes from NPR sponsor, BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers licensed professional counselors who specialize in issues such as isolation, depression, stress, anxiety, and more. Connect with your professional counselor in a safe and private online environment when you need professional help. Get help at your own time and your own pace.

Schedule secure video or phone sessions, plus chat and text with your therapist. Visit betterhelp.com slash consider to learn more and get 10% off your first month. Frogs pooping beetles, featherless flying reptiles, stinky chatty cheese. We got it all on Wow in the World, the NPR podcast for kids. I'm Mindy Thomas inviting you to join me and Guy Roz for an animated scientific adventure of the mind. It's Wow in the World from Tinkercast and NPR. Listen now. It's Consider This from NPR. Before we talk about plans for debt forgiveness, let's talk about what student debt is actually doing to the economy. Because loans can crush

an individual, but when lots of people have more debt than they can handle, well, that ripples out. And some people might postpone buying homes or cars or starting a family. So this is even before the pandemic. I would say we were really seeing crisis levels of student loan defaults. More than one in four borrowers prior to the pandemic was experiencing a student loan default within 12 years of starting college. Judith Scott Clayton is an associate professor of economics and education in the Teachers College at Columbia University. And I asked her how people should understand this number, $1.6 trillion in student debt?

Well, I think to me, what doesn't freak me out, it's not that big number. It's not the $1.6 trillion. A lot of that debt is actually good debt. It represents investments in education, in individuals' future productivity, and it's not all bad. Where it really concerns me is the number of people who are taking out education debt and not seeing that return and ending up in default. And in fact, when we look at that, what we see is that the likelihood of default is actually highest for borrowers with relatively small debts, $10,000, $5,000. And is there a way to describe who those people tend to be? Does it disproportionately affect certain groups? Absolutely. So it's certainly the case that

a lot of borrowers with lower amounts of debt have lower amounts of debt because they never actually finished a degree. So it's sort of the worst of both worlds. You have the debt without a degree. But that's not the only place where we see problems. We also see a very strong racial disparity in student loan outcomes. For a Black college graduate with a bachelor's degree, the likelihood that they will experience a default is actually higher than a white college dropout. And what are the broader economic ripples of that? I could imagine it makes it harder for somebody to buy a house or, you know, get a loan for a car or other economic consequences. Absolutely. There's a lot of concern about the general overhang of people carrying a lot of debt and what that does to their ability to

borrow for other things, to buy a home, to invest in their own children's education. And there's certainly some reason to worry about that. But I am most worried about the economic consequences of massive numbers of defaults, student loan default, which can have implications for your credit, your ability to borrow, potentially even your ability to rent an apartment or get a license for some professions in some states. You know, every generation more people go to college, and every generation college gets more expensive, and every generation more jobs require a college degree. And so if there is no intervention, is this problem just

going to keep getting worse? I think we definitely have reached a point where something needs to change. And I think there's a fair amount of consensus about that, actually, that we need to do something differently. So I hope that in this same conversation about student loan cancellation and what we can do to help borrowers who are already in trouble, I hope that those conversations will be paired with what we can do to make sure that we don't get into this problem again. Judith Scott Clayton is an associate professor of economics and education at Columbia University. Well, not everyone agrees that student loan forgiveness is the right approach. Even some people who would benefit from it aren't on board, like Todd Hagopian in Tulsa,

Oklahoma. He identifies as libertarian, and he says he wants to be responsible for paying back his own outstanding debt, all $50,000 of it. You need to take responsibility for your actions. You don't just ask the bank to relieve the debt. I don't think that's really fair that they should get $50,000 of free stuff. He says learning how to manage his loan payments was part of becoming an adult. I think that adversity makes you smarter and stronger, and we should not be spending hundreds of billions of dollars just to stop people from getting smarter and stronger in their younger years. Shauna Kostikov-McComb in Indianapolis would not benefit from debt forgiveness. She graduated with $76,000 in student loans. And eventually,

she got tired of paying $600 every month with a lot of it going to interest. So five years ago, she wiped out her savings to make a final payment of $10,000. And I remember the day that I paid them off, I sat in the parking lot of my bank and I cried. That was the hugest weight lifted. And despite, or maybe because of that sacrifice, she doesn't want others to go through what she experienced. Just because I struggle doesn't mean I want everybody else to. Okay, now let's talk about how this debate sounds in Washington. Anya Kamenetz covers education for NPR, and she's been following student debt for years.

Hi, Anya. Hey, Ari. What kind of relief proposals are on the table right now? So if you have student loans, you probably have not been paying them because the COVID relief package in the spring included a temporary pause on federal student loan payments that has been extended now through December 31st. And one Democratic proposal on the table is simply to continue that extension through next fall. More recently, Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer introduced a resolution that calls on President-elect Joe Biden to simply forgive the first $50,000 in federal student loan debt for everybody across the board. So that would mean completely erasing student loan debt from more than three quarters of borrowers.

But it's interesting that this is not a proposal for Congress to do that. It's a recommendation for the president to do that. Can he just unilaterally make that decision and forgive student loan debt? It seems like he can. So this has not been tested in any court, but the Senate resolution cited a Harvard Legal Clinic's opinion that simply writing off student loans is something that the president can instruct the education secretary to do with no congressional approval. So in theory, this huge loan forgiveness could be done on day one doesn't depend on the outcome of the two January runoffs, for example, or Senate control. And is forgiving $50,000 per borrower something that President-elect Biden has said

he wants to do? Not quite. Here he is at a press conference last week talking about a Democratic House proposal for a little bit less than that. The legislation passed by the Democratic House calls for immediate $10,000 forgiveness of student loans. It's holding people up. They're in real trouble. They're having to make choices between paying their student loan and paying the rent, those kinds of decisions. But here's the catch. So the House bill limits that $10,000 relief to only private, not federal student loans. It also limits that relief to what he calls economically distressed borrowers. You heard Biden talk about people who are having to choose between paying the rent and paying their loan bill.

So that's potentially a much more limited offer, not only than what's in the Senate plan, but actually what's in Biden's own campaign plan. What is in that campaign plan? So in several places in his campaign proposals, Biden talks about immediately canceling a minimum $10,000 in federal loans, not private loans. And there's no mention of a means test. So by saying it's only economically distressed borrowers, that could potentially be many fewer people that get that help. And does it sound like Biden at this point is going to ignore his campaign platform on those broader forgiveness points? I wish I could be more clear on this point, Ari. I asked Biden's team. They simply pointed me to a full range of his ideas to make college cheaper and loans more manageable.

He's talked about expanding the income-based repayment program to make repayment easier for everyone, to improve public service loan forgiveness for teachers and doctors and civil servants, things that the education department could potentially improve on the margins without legislation, but for major changes, they would definitely need Congress. Taking a step back, Anya, candidates have been talking about forgiving student debt for a long time, and it keeps ballooning, and there haven't been solutions yet. Why is this such a tough knot to untie? You know, I think there's a bunch of reasons. First of all, there's an uneasiness about sort of the moral valence of canceling debt. For one thing, people who have access to higher education in this country, they're relatively privileged. So if you target relief at only student debtors, there's some people who feel like, oh, that would be unfair to those who did

not get to go to higher education in the first place. And then there's also people who maybe paid off their student loans and they look back and say, why should these folks that came up after me get some relief that I never got? So there's always been a little bit of uneasiness in the debate versus people who say, you know what, this is a great way to stimulate the economy. It would close the racial wealth gap. And by the way, you know, education should be a human right. It should be available to everyone who's able to take advantage of it. And that's how we get a truly democratic society. So, you know, it's a debate that's going to keep going, I would say, probably beyond this election cycle. NPR's Anya Kamenetz.

You're listening to Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.