US President Joe Biden is taking part in a CNN City Hall at the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on February 16, 2021.
SAUL LOEB | AFP | Getty Images
“We need forgiveness for student loans beyond the potential $ 10,000 your administration has proposed,” Jocelyn Fish, a community theater marketing director, told President Joe Biden in CNN’s presidential hall Tuesday night. “We need at least a minimum of $ 50,000. What will you do to make that happen?”
“I will not let that happen,” the president replied.
Biden suggested that it did not make sense to use money to forgive student debt ‘for people who went to Harvard and Yale and Penn’.
The scholarship quickly rattled off, advocates and student loan borrowers urging Biden to increase the amount he supports from $ 10,000 to $ 50,000 and cancel the loans through executive action.
Advocates also point out that it is largely a myth that people with student debt – especially those who struggle with it – have the benefit of a prestigious education behind them.
“The vast majority of students attending the elite schools named by the president in CNN City Hall study with no student loan debt,” said Eileen Connor, director of litigation at Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending.
Indeed, only 0.3% of federal study students attended Ivy League colleges, according to estimates provided by Mark Kantrowitz to the higher education expert at CNBC.
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“The Ivy League colleges are only eight colleges out of more than 6,000,” Kantrowitz said. “Ivy League colleges also have ‘no loans’ for financial aid that significantly reduces the percentage of students who borrow.”
The president’s statements indicate that he still has not come up with a broader plan for forgiveness of student loans such as those advocated by his progressive opponents in the Democratic primary. (Biden said he preferred $ 10,000 forgiveness and more for those who attended public colleges and historically black colleges and universities.)
His comments also reflect the arguments of Republicans and some moderate Democrats that the waiver of student debt is a handout for Americans with a flashy degree.
‘If you raised $ 100,000 to study poetry at Bowdoin, and then you sold coffee at Starbucks, you may regret some of your choices, and I sympathize with you, but I do not know why you owe an amount of Do not earn $ 50,000. taxpayer, ”said Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
But only 12% of student loan lenders attended many selective colleges and universities, Kantrowitz found. About a quarter of the borrowers are from private, non-profit colleges.
But by far the majority of borrowers – 49% – come from public colleges.
“Public colleges are not cheap,” Kantrowitz said, adding that it still costs more than $ 22,000 a year to attend one, including tuition, room, board and expenses.
Meanwhile, another quarter of the borrowers attended lucrative schools, which came under fire for misleading students about programs and career outcomes, as well as for the prey of veterans and coloreds. Nearly half of those who take out student loans at these schools end up failing.
“Wealthy students who attend ‘elite’ schools usually do not struggle,” said Ashley Harrington, federal attorney general at the Center for Responsible Lending.
“We need to look at what is really happening with this crisis and who is actually being affected right now,” Harrington said. ‘Student debt has an excessive effect on people with low income and wealth [and] Black and brown people struggle the most. ‘