Blanket student-loan forgiveness remains possible, but in all likelihood, the Biden presidency will yield only small-bore reforms. Here's where the fight for debt relief now stands
Now that’s what I call cancel culture. Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images The cost of college in America is too damn high. For decades, that has been the consensus among debt-laden university graduates and policy experts alike. The United States spends more per student on higher education than any developed country save Luxembourg. And in the judgment of the OECD, America’s exorbitant tuition rates have “virtually no relationship to the value that students could possibly get in exchange.
• Forgiving all of the undergraduate student debt accrued by borrowers who attended public colleges or minority-serving nonprofit colleges. Biden has rejected this proposal on both substantive and procedural grounds. The president said in February, “I don’t think I have the authority to [cancel student debt] by signing the pen.” He has separately maintained that $50,000 is too high a sum, especially given the relatively high incomes of Americans who graduate from high-tuition colleges.
If Biden had put student-debt relief in his budget request, it wouldn’t have made much substantive difference. Moderate Democrats in the Senate have already demonstrated that they’re perfectly comfortable rejecting the president’s requests. And as of this writing, there aren’t 50 votes in the Senate for forgiving $10,000 per borrower. Generally speaking, presidential budgets are largely public-relations documents since Congress has the ultimate authority over spending.
This theory makes sense to me. But it needs to make sense to federal judges in order to work, and thanks to the Trump presidency, the federal judiciary is quite conservative. “Using an executive order to forgive federal student loans will likely be met with a lawsuit and preliminary injunction and eventually fail,” Kantrowitz told NBC in November.
The administration’s most significant actions on student debt will likely come through regulatory rewrites of existing debt-forgiveness programs. The White House has already taken steps to eliminate red tape and make it easier for borrowers to qualify for forgiveness. But its full package of regulatory reforms will take time to implement, as they must be enacted through an arduous process of hearings and deliberation.
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