It’s hard to find any pundit of any political stripe who likes Biden’s debt forgiveness program. The vitriolic reaction to the announcement is perhaps the most impressive bi-partisan, political punditry, “kumbaya” moment I can recall since we started arming Ukraine.
On balance, I think Biden’s plan is a good one, and I hope it stands up to any challenges. I think its critics are missing what lies at the heart of the plan.
There are some important realities about colleges that for a long time I was clueless about. In many impoverished areas, the majority of high school graduates are not ready for college. Their high school diplomas imply otherwise, but that is a tragic lie. Many of these students who decide to continue their education will attend community colleges. But the vast majority of the students will not earn a degree.
The average “completion rate” (defined as completing a degree in six years) is somewhere around 40%. That’s the average. There are community colleges whose completion rates are in the teens! Meaning fewer than one in five students get a degree.
My prior assumptions about college were formed by my peer set. At around age 18, you went to a good, if not great, school, and if you dropped out it was to become an entrepreneur like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. Or to find yourself.
You didn’t drop out because your high school hadn’t prepared you to pass introductory math. You didn’t drop out because at age 28, you couldn’t juggle both your full time education and your full time job to support your family. You didn’t drop out, because you had no money to pay for housing or food or textbooks.
I’m not making these examples up. I was part of an organization whose mission was to provide additional supports to inner city students starting community college before and during their freshman year. Our support came in the form of helping the students get the financial aid to which they were entitled, tutoring, coaching, mentoring, supplemental math, and designing a career goal. The organization was a success in that many lives were improved, and some were transformed, but the amount of support needed made it impossible to scale. As well, given how many difficulties each student had, the path to success required tremendous grit and a lot of luck.
When most of these students dropped out, and the odds were heavily stacked that they would, they had spent a lot of time and effort and energy for no diploma and a slug of student debt. The tragedy of this inefficiency is bad enough. But consider the effect on the students’ view of our country and its promise of upward mobility. Who wouldn’t be cynical and angry?
I don’t like arguing from anecdotes, but these are not anecdotes. The students we helped were both statistically significant in number and representative in characteristic of those growing up in areas of American blight. And I don’t want to forget the millions of students who were conned into attending educationally bogus for-profit colleges.
So, when I consider Biden’s debt plan, I realize that millions of the students I’ve described will get full relief for the debt they accrued in what was in effect a systemic con job. I believe that this moral and material redress is fair and just and noble. And I’m proud that we as a country are doing this.
And if some students get debt relief who might not have needed it, and if some students and parents are angry because they paid off their student debt, pre-Biden’s plan, I say that’s unfortunate, but let’s not make the cliched mistake of using the impossible standard of perfect to stigmatize what is good.
It’s easy to be a critic, so much harder to get something done.
I think the people who find fault with this debt relief are the ones who can see past the fact that this debt relief won’t directly help them. That’s too short sighted. As we know an educated populace is important to a healthy democracy and also helps make a stable middle class. We shouldn’t saddle the underprivileged with excessive debt as they seek that education. I think this debt relief plan is a good first step. Let’s try this out, see what happens, then refine the plan once we have more data about education debt relief.
A well made argument. I think that there are a lot of them on both sides of the issue. One that I haven’t heard, but that I think about sometimes, is the highly interdependent nature of the country/economy. For instance, some taxpayers paid significant tax increases so that the money could be used to encourage other people to invest in the economy – people whose investments will do/did quite well and were made possible by others who will receive no direct benefit. Other taxpayers either paid more taxes or suffered inflation so that we could build bridges in places where those taxpayers may never go. The list is endless and encompasses legislation championed by both parties. Someone's ox is always gored - at least a little. And yes, those acts of legislation are often wielded not exclusively for the good of the country, but for political gain – as I believe this one has been. Shocking. But your bottom line – to not sacrifice good at the alter of the perfect – has the ring of common sense to it. Last thought - after all is said and done, I do not believe that the Supreme court will uphold the President’s authority to do what he did under these circumstances. We’ll see. Thanks for another good post.