Debt Forgiveness Is a Political Minefield

Last month the Biden administration announced plans to forgive the first $10,000 of most outstanding federal student loans, and up to $20,000 for students who received Pell Grants.

As a means of providing immediate relief to people caught in the pincers of credentialism, structural racism, and the Great Recession-era jobs crisis, it was brilliant. But it did nothing to stop more debt from accumulating in the long term. The postsecondary cost crisis cannot be solved by letting colleges charge whatever they like, lending students large sums of money to pay those bills, and then immediately (or eventually) forgiving the loans.

The debt-relief movement grew out of the pure, uncut class consciousness of the Occupy protests and the larger generational grievance of millennials who left college with unprecedented loan burdens during the worst unemployment crisis in decades. Civil-rights advocates organized around new evidence of an acute student-borrowing crisis in the Black community. Progressive champions like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren took up the cause, and total loan forgiveness became a standard plank in the left agenda. Biden’s decision was an enormous victory for advocates and a case study in how seemingly radical policy ideas can become mainstream.

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