What is going on with student loans?

[Anonymous]

Rumor mill is Dr. Jill Biden wanted all undergraduate federal loans forgiven. Lifetime max a dependent undergraduate student can borrow is up to $31,000 (principal, before interest and fees). That rumor is what was fueling the astroturfed rage tweets by rich neoliberals these last few days.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It honestly feels like progressives have gotten punked with this whole student loans thing. I do think there are a lot of borrowers that need relief, but the advocates are demanding blanket forgiveness for everyone which makes it impossible to target those in need. I went to an expensive private university and there were a lot of people who took out six figure loans for undergrad programs in things like drama, that are just not likely to lead to a high paying career. We should not be incentivizing that which is what this does. There are genuine equity issues but there are also genuinely poor decisions that at least when I was in undergrad were not just a few isolated it cases, it seemed like kids in high school were getting the message that it's okay to take on that much debt so they can attend their dream school (expensive private universities). I'm much more sympathetic to people who went to community college or state schools and just don't make enough money to pay it off.

The blanket forgiveness jubilee is pushed by overeducated laptop class layabouts in Washington, NYC, and Boston. They signal boost each other on Twitter. They push for it because they all have master’s degrees and JDs after spending a decade in college. I have exponentially more empathy for poor and middle class kids in flyover country with loans from 2 and 4 year colleges, especially since half never graduated. The president should listen to his wife and cancel all undergrad loans. $10k doesn’t even cover the average dropout at Jill’s community college. They have $11k in loans, before interest and fees.

[Anonymous]

[Anonymous]

Utterly ridiculous. Forgiveness doesn’t fix any of the underlying problems with cost of tuition and student loans. What are they going to do, forgive loans every ten years? It’s meaningless and will not end well.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:https://www.newyorker.com/news/us-journal/the-aging-student-debtors-of-america?

They need to forgive these student loans for those who are seniors. There are 80 and 90 year olds who can’t pay it off.

How the hell do 80 and 90 year olds have student loans. College was so much cheaper when they were in college.

Graduate school loans.

The woman in the story borrowed $29,000 to go to law school in her 50s in the 1980s.

I don't see exactly why she wasn't able to pay it off. The article doesn't mention if she completed law school, but says she worked for 30 years at minimum wage. So I don't know what happened.

In 1983, at the age of fifty-two, Betty Ann enrolled in New York University’s law school. As a middle-aged Black woman, she wasn’t exactly the typical N.Y.U. law student. Her white male classmates would slyly elbow her books off the long library tables, and once, while standing at her locker, a classmate waved a ten-thousand-dollar tuition check, signed by his father, in her face. Betty Ann had borrowed twenty-nine thousand dollars in federal loans. Today, she owes $329,309.69 in student debt. She is ninety-one years old.

(snip)


Betty Ann and I spent an afternoon in early July poring over the thicket of loan statements and letters she had amassed from the Department of Education, guaranty agencies, and various loan servicers. Her payment history has been poorly documented; the partial records available to us showed $11,507 of payments since 2010. Years ago, she sold her family furniture to make loan payments, and the apartment she now rents in suburban Pennsylvania remains sparsely decorated: a coffee table doubles as a bookcase, and a wobbly dining table served as her home office during the pandemic. (Until she retired a few months ago, Betty Ann spent the last thirty years working full time at a nonprofit for near-minimum wage.) At one point, we tried to set up her online federal student-aid account: over and over, Betty Ann would read me her information as I typed it into the computer, only to have the systems glitch and freeze.

As the sun lowered on the apartment blocks and sounds of dinner filled the courtyard, I leaned back and asked Betty Ann what she made of all of this, this puzzle of paperwork and the ominous threats that wafted from it—the ensuing damage to her credit, the rising fees, the warning of more letters to come. “Oh, I never expected it would go like this!” she told me. She hadn’t anticipated that her dream of getting a law degree would crash so directly into the realities of being an older woman of color on the job market. My mind flashed to Robert’s wish for her and her sisters to attend college, his belief that education was the most powerful tool for Black women to thrive in an unjust world. What would he make of his retired daughter spending a summer day squinting at her student loans?

Betty Ann’s debt, in some ways, casts a shadow over her life, inviting doubt to hover over her decisions to pursue law school and leave a bad relationship despite its financial securities. She wonders if, without debt, she could have stayed in the home she once owned, rather than spending her final years in a rented apartment that needs new carpet and a paint job. Could she have retired earlier and caught up on her reading? Could she have finally written her family history, a story which blazes through the Trail of Tears, Reconstruction, and redlining? These matters are material.

But the debt is also an abstraction—something incomprehensible and alien to Betty Ann’s daily life. How does one possibly understand the mutation of a modest loan into a figure more than ten times its original size? As Betty Ann’s balance has grown exponentially larger, the servicing companies and guaranty agencies have made profits many times the amount of her original loan. The colossal sum being demanded from her bears little resemblance to the sum she took out nearly four decades ago. It is now something else entirely.

[Anonymous]

What is needed more than anything else is to be able to discharge student loan debt in bankruptcy.

Of course, that would make it much harder and more expensive to get student loans in the first place.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What is needed more than anything else is to be able to discharge student loan debt in bankruptcy.

Of course, that would make it much harder and more expensive to get student loans in the first place.

Student loans were dischargeable. Biden supported the legislation that ended that ability.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:https://www.newyorker.com/news/us-journal/the-aging-student-debtors-of-america?

They need to forgive these student loans for those who are seniors. There are 80 and 90 year olds who can’t pay it off.

How the hell do 80 and 90 year olds have student loans. College was so much cheaper when they were in college.

Parent loans for their kids.

[Anonymous]

Eleventh hour chatter President Biden might call an audible and announce something far more compassionate than $10K tomorrow. Pressure from Black Caucus. Black women, who made him President, have the highest student loan sums. Over $42K on average.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What is needed more than anything else is to be able to discharge student loan debt in bankruptcy.

Of course, that would make it much harder and more expensive to get student loans in the first place.

Student loans were dischargeable. Biden supported the legislation that ended that ability.

They should not be discharged and only forgiven if you teach for five years or in the medical field and go to areas with no doctors or nurses.

[Anonymous]

Schumer, Warnock and NAACP lobbying Biden to "go big." I could see $25,000 and/or all the undergrad loans. We'll see.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Eleventh hour chatter President Biden might call an audible and announce something far more compassionate than $10K tomorrow. Pressure from Black Caucus. Black women, who made him President, have the highest student loan sums. Over $42K on average.

I'm not voting for him in the next election.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Eleventh hour chatter President Biden might call an audible and announce something far more compassionate than $10K tomorrow. Pressure from Black Caucus. Black women, who made him President, have the highest student loan sums. Over $42K on average.

I'm not voting for him in the next election.

I'm going to be a Millennial GOP voter if Biden doesn't give student loan forgiveness and extend the payment pause.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Eleventh hour chatter President Biden might call an audible and announce something far more compassionate than $10K tomorrow. Pressure from Black Caucus. Black women, who made him President, have the highest student loan sums. Over $42K on average.

I'm not voting for him in the next election.

If tomorrow president Biden says $25K cancelled let alone $50K, means-tested, I will spend the next 2 months canvassing and phone banking for Democrats. Some college and college-educated Gen X, Y and Z will never in their lifetime vote GOP. Biden will be FDR status.

[Anonymous]