 March 12, 2021 |
| Both of our jobs here in Opinion — as host of The Argument podcast (Jane) and host of the Debatable newsletter (Spencer) — are to understand what different people think about some of the country’s biggest disagreements. This week we both tackled one that’s gotten a lot of attention lately: student debt. |
| By now the facts are well known: Americans collectively owe some $1.7 trillion in student loan debt, and it’s crippling the economy and making millions of people miserable. It’s not an especially new crisis. |
| But what is new is that solutions at the scale of the problem are finally being taken seriously — so much so that the top Senate Democrat is calling on President Biden to cancel up to $50,000 in debt per borrower. |
| Both of us have student loans, so we were already familiar with the debate over these kinds of proposals. But this week’s episode of The Argument and edition of Debatable gave us a reason to talk to and read people who gave us new ways of thinking about the issue. We found them illuminating, and hope you will too. |
| Spencer: Some 45 million Americans have student loan debt, which works out to more than $30,000 per person. But most Americans don’t have any student loan debt. Why should they care? |
| Jane: Student loan debt is a massive weight on the economy, and on the personal economies of millions of Americans. Those 45 million Americans make up roughly 13 percent of the population, and they include doctors and lawyers and New York Times employees — but also 3.9 million undergraduates who never completed their studies and are burdened with thousands of dollars in debt. |
| Spencer: Right, there’s a common understanding that this problem affects only the upper-middle class, when that’s not actually the case. What other wrinkles in this debate do you think get smoothed over when it’s churned through the hot-take-industrial complex? |
| Jane: We think about student loan cancellation in the same way we think about colleges and universities — as defined by the most visible and, often, most powerful institutions. But just like most people didn’t go to Harvard or Yale, most people who have student loan debt didn’t go to top-tier schools, and many didn’t get to finish their degrees. What about you? |
| Spencer: It’s easy to become so consumed by the economics — which income quintiles have the most debt, how debt affects the racial wealth gap, whether cancellation ought to be means-tested — that larger political questions go underexplored. Like: To what end should student debt be canceled or kept? Often people in this debate are talking past each other because their arguments flow from different visions of what higher education is for. Should it be a personal investment that individuals fund themselves, or should it be a public good, like K-12 education, funded through taxation? I think that’s a good place to start. |
| Jane: Absolutely. And I think it’s worth considering that how you think about college shapes how you think about student loans and student loan cancellation. Is college a public good? Should it be? If so, it should be provided as cheaply as possible. But millions of Americans don’t go to college — though six in 10 jobs require some education beyond a high school diploma. Is making college such a priority at the federal level a good idea when there are ways to make life easier for low-income Americans more directly? |
| Spencer: What’s the best argument you’ve heard for and against student debt cancellation? |
| Jane: Canceling student debt would provide a massive boost to the economy — one worth billions of dollars in G.D.P., according to a paper by the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. But student debt cancellation could also increase the racial wealth gap; while both Black and white families would benefit from cancellation, students from white families are more likely to have completed college and graduate degree programs. And student debt cancellation doesn’t solve the problem of how student debt is accumulated in the first place. |
| Spencer: In my opinion, the best argument in favor of cancellation is, like the argument for free college, pretty straightforward: As E. Tammy Kim wrote in The Times, “some things, like education, should be had by all — on equal terms.” The best argument against is that in a world of finite resources, there are more efficient uses — in terms of reducing suffering — of such a large sum of money. Speaking of finite resources: If I were Biden and had over a trillion to spend on any of my agenda items, I’d spend it on climate change. |
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