D’Aungilique Jackson of Fresno, Calif., holds a sign reading “Cancel Student Debt Relief” outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., Friday, June 30, 2023, after the U.S. high court struck down President Joe Biden’s student debt relief plan. Debt” sign.
Kent Nishimura | Los Angeles Times | Getty Images
It took Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin about 30 years to pay off his $100,000 student loan balance. He told CNBC he wonders why other borrowers should have their debt forgiven and has fought President Joe Biden’s efforts to cancel their loans.
The topic of student loan forgiveness raises strong feelings about fairness, personal responsibility and economic soundness. The Biden administration’s recent student loan relief proposal received a record number of public comments, including Over 148,000 people shared their opinions.
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When Marlon Fox, a chiropractor in North Charleston, South Carolina, received $119,500 in student debt relief last year, he didn’t tell many people his story. He lives in a predominantly Republican district that is deeply suspicious of debt forgiveness for those who benefit from higher education.
“They say, ‘Hey, are your school loans paid off? That’s not fair,'” Fox told CNBC last year.
Why is the topic of student loan forgiveness so fraught? CNBC asked a number of different experts what they thought.
”A common sense fairness question”
“There is a common-sense fairness issue when it comes to eliminating student debt,” Griffin wrote in an email to CNBC. He served as Arkansas lieutenant governor before being sworn in as attorney general in 2023.
“It’s not that the debt isn’t being paid, it’s that the debt is being paid using existing resources from taxpayers,” said Griffin. This spring he and six other state attorneys general challenged the Biden administration’s new reimbursement The lawsuit was filed over a loan plan, known as the Savings with Value for Education (SAVE) program, which allows for faster debt relief.
“Is it fair for people like me who have paid off their student loans, or for people who never went to college and therefore have no student debt, to have our tax dollars pay for other people’s personal debt?” he said. .
“A Narrative of Personal Responsibility”
To understand where we are today with debt, we need to look back,” Kate Padgett Walshis a philosophy professor at Iowa State University who studies the ethics of lending.
“Long before the invention of money, humans owed each other money in families and small communities,” she said. “Children owe their parents for care, and families and friends owe each other a debt as we help each other. Paying off these debts is part of living together and building community. Debt is a fundamental feature of human life, among others.”
She added: “A person who benefits from family, friends and community but does not contribute his or her fair share cannot be a responsible member of that group.”
But Padgett-Walsh said so many people now believe it is irresponsible not to repay debt because they have been “inundated with information” about it by entities that profit from it.
“Lenders and businesses — especially now, given how much of our consumption is underpinned by debt — profit from people paying debt and feeling obligated to pay it back,” she said. “So they encourage us to take on as much debt as possible and then insist that not paying it back is morally wrong.”
“We believe in this message in part because it resonates with our fundamental awareness that we have an obligation to family, friends and communities to repay debts that existed before the invention of money,” Padgett-Walsh said.
“But this may blind us to some of the real harm caused by actual forms of financial debt,” she said. “Our priority should be preventing and alleviating student debt, not adhering to a narrative of personal responsibility.”
“A different relationship with the education system”
“One of the reasons loan forgiveness has become a partisan issue is that members of each party have different relationships with the education system,” said Devon SingerAssociate Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College and author of the forthcoming book “Sacred Debt.”
“Statistically, a higher percentage of Democratic voters graduate from four-year colleges and go to graduate school. So student loan forgiveness is likely to directly impact more Democrats than Republicans.”
“The fact that most Americans don’t have a college degree may also mean that many are resisting loan forgiveness because student debt is not their problem, so forgiveness doesn’t seem to directly benefit them,” Singer said. Religion and Politics, Economics of cross.
He added that different parties also have different understandings of the role of higher education.
“Democrats are likely to express the view that education contributes to the public good and supports engaged citizenship. Some opponents of student loan forgiveness view education as a private good that benefits the purchaser.”
“Generation gap”
“I think there are a lot of misunderstandings about fairness as well,” said Charlie EatonAssociate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Merced.
“A lot of people have a hard time putting themselves in the shoes of a student loan borrower if they’re not a student loan borrower,” he said. “There’s a generational gap. Many older Americans don’t need to borrow money to go to college.”
“A lot of people also don’t understand that many student loan borrowers who can’t pay off their debt keep paying it off,” Eaton said. “It’s not that they don’t pay off their debt, it’s that the interest on the debt is so high that even if they pay it off, the debt size is still there. Increase.”
Fox, a chiropractor, had her debt forgiven last year and has been paying off student debt since 1988.
Over the years, he paid about $200,000. He initially borrowed nearly $60,000.
