Elissa Nadworny, Reporter/Editor, NPR Ed
Fenaba R. Addo, Associate Professor of Public Policy
Jalil Mustaffa Bishop, Vice-Provost Postdoctoral Scholar
Posted on 02/21/2021 6:35:51 AM PST by Oldeconomybuyer
At a CNN town hall on Tuesday night, President Biden was asked if he supported the idea of forgiving up to $50,000 of student loan debt for individuals.
His answer: No. He supports cancelling $10,000 in debt, he explained. But he said he is wary of erasing big chunks of loans for people who went to Ivy League schools: "The idea that ... I'm going to forgive the debt, the billions of dollars in debt, for people who have gone to Harvard and Yale and Penn ..."
Instead, he explained, he'd rather use that money for other priorities, like early childhood education or making community college free.
But here's the problem: Regardless of the broader question about whether loan forgiveness is a good idea, Biden's comments do not reflect the true picture of the $1.6 trillion owed by federal student borrowers, or of the borrowers who would benefit most from forgiveness.
Most student loan borrowers did not go to highly selective colleges, because most students do not go to those schools. People who go to Ivy League schools represent less than 0.5% of the nearly 15 million undergraduate college students in the U.S., and a lot of them don't have to take out student loans to do it.
"Misperceptions that higher education graduates are all from elite institutions are pervasive, and do not help educate the public about the value of postsecondary education," says Fenaba Addo, an associate professor who studies student loan debt at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Think about it: Students who do go to the most selective schools tend to come from wealthy families, and many pay full tuition. Last year, 54% of undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania, for example, didn't even qualify for financial aid, according to data from the school. At Harvard, the number was 45%.
These highly selective colleges have long struggled to enroll students who aren't from the top tier of wealth in this country. A new report shows that, even today, low-income students who qualify for federal Pell grants make up less than 16% of enrollment at many of these schools.
And, for students at these institutions who do need financial aid? Many offer financial aid packages aimed at keeping students free from federal student loans. At Harvard, only 2% of the undergrad population receives any federal student loans, according to the College Scorecard.
Instead of focusing, as Biden did, on who shouldn't get the benefit, we should be focusing on who would really benefit from loan forgiveness, argues Jalil Mustaffa Bishop, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania.
He says using the Ivy Leagues to argue for a much smaller amount of debt reduction, or none at all, is misleading: "The idea that small-level, or no debt cancellation is the best way forward because a trivial amount of rich people may benefit is a talking point to distract," he says. Households with student debt tend to have the least amount of wealth, federal data shows. The people who struggle to repay their student loans tend to be those that didn't graduate and have small debt amounts.
"If [Biden] is concerned that the rich or elite will benefit," Bishop adds, then there are policy approaches to deal with that: "He can focus on increasing taxes on households making over $400,000 as he promised during his campaign."
Bishop's research focuses on the burden of debt on Black borrowers, who are often the ones hardest hit by student debt. They face labor market discrimination, higher rates of unemployment, lower family wealth and other forms of systemic racism.
He argues that the $50,000 figure for loan forgiveness could go a long way towards reducing the inequalities in a system that both forces Black families to take out more debt, and to have more difficulty paying those loans back.
Addo, at UNC-Chapel Hill, agrees: "We know that Black borrowers struggle with repayment independent of their institution type and whether or not they completed a degree."
And so her advice for President Biden the next time he's asked about this issue? If you only get three sentences to talk about debt forgiveness, she says, "why not acknowledge that a 1.7 trillion dollar debt is an indication of a serious problem."
Elissa Nadworny, Reporter/Editor, NPR Ed
Fenaba R. Addo, Associate Professor of Public Policy
Jalil Mustaffa Bishop, Vice-Provost Postdoctoral Scholar
Well, SHE is obviously slanted toward the Left.
I forgive her though.
“....an associate professor who studies student loan debt...”
Talk about bootstrapping.
Student debt forgiveness, massive Federal aid to non productive Democratic urban zones, green new deal absurdities and overall massive deficit spending will weaken the dollar immensely. Forget Bitcoin as a refuge. Buy gold before it skyrockets by summer. There will be the appearance of pseudo prosperity as the COVID pandemic recedes in the next few months, but the Biden clown parade will weaken the US economy and the US dollar within a year.
Are there students in college that shouldn’t be there due to limited intellectual abilities to handle the curriculum?
Are colleges simply sucking in students that will never be able to graduate in order to to pay the college’s overhead?
Why don’t colleges guarantee a portion of the student’s loans? That would make the colleges have a vested interest in the student’s post-graduation financial success.
NPR fact check? R0TFLMAO!
And 16 other state AGs...
And she seriously beleives that she is nad worthy.
Fact check?
It’s an editorial.
Millennials are getting buyer’s remorse, eh?
LOL LOL LOL! They ain’t seen nuthin’ yet!
Wait ‘til more immigrants take more jobs away from them, gasoline goes up to $4.00+ per gal, mortgage and car loan interest rates go up, rental rates rise, their wages stagnate but inflation makes everything cost more, etc.
I wonder if they realize the Biden vote steal took votes from Bernie, too.
There you go again, asking logical questions!
This is about our government putting young people in financial bondage to them (when the fed took student loans). It adds another social control mechanism for Big Brother.
How sad for our Children and Grandchildren as we approach his goal line.
THIS WAS HIS ENTIRE QUOTE: A sobering reminder. It’s been
almost sixty one years since Russia’s Khrushchev delivered this.
Do you remember September 29, 1959?
THIS WAS HIS ENTIRE QUOTE:
“Your children’s children will live under communism, You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept communism outright; but we will keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you will finally wake up and find you already have Communism. We will not have to fight you; We will so weaken your economy, until you will fall like overripe fruit into our hands.” “The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”
Remember, socialism leads to Communism. So, how do you create a Socialistic State?
There are 8 levels of control; read the following recipe:
1) Healthcare - Control healthcare and you control the people.
2) Poverty - Increase the poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them.
3) Debt - Increase the debt to an unsustainable level. That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty.
4) Gun Control - Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government That way you are able to create a police state.
5) Welfare - Take control of every aspect (food, housing, income) of their lives because that will make them fully dependent on the government.
6) Education - Take control of what people read and listen to and take control of what children learn in school.
7) Religion - Remove the belief in God from the Government and schools because the people need to believe in ONLY the government knowing what is best for the people.
8) Class Warfare - Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. Eliminate the middle class This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to tax the wealthy with the support of the poor
Bkmk
Is not the mantra of the ‘D’ Party to be FAIR? So cancelling $ from student loan balances is UNFAIR to those who made enormous efforts to either avoid, alternative education choices or pay off the loan. HOW FAIR is that?
apnews.com
April 10,2019
At a House hearing featuring a panel of seven bank CEOs, Maxine Waters was loaded for bear.....she ticked off figures on student loan debt and defaults, then asked, “What are you guys doing to help us with this student loan debt? Who would like to answer first? Mr. Monahan, big bank.”
Bank of America chairman and CEO Brian Monahan replied, “We stopped making student loans in 2007 or so (after the US govt began making the loans).”
===========================================
The govt makes it real easy to get student loans and hypes its participation in loading-up students w/ debt.
StudentAid.gov is the U.S. Department of Education's comprehensive database for all federal student aid information. This is one-stop-shopping for all of federal student loan information.
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING StudentAid.gov keeps track of an individual's student loan amounts and balances.
Now there is a darn good question. The primary function of the hated SAT was to ascertain
whether a H.S. student had the acumen to finish a college program and obtain a degree.
Today, many States, like California, have abolished the 'racis' SAT so as to afford easy entry
into their halls of higher learning. I remember walking the halls of a 'magnet' H.S. that
promoted their minority students, by targeted academics that rewarded many A grades, into acceptance
at a plethora of colleges. No mention or plaques of recognition were evident as to how many of these
matriculating students ever graduated from their accepting colleges.
Bottom line...Bidens not keeping his promise....yet again.
After slander and slurs for four years against Trump, now the "fact check" daily feature on Biden and Harris will be brief---- "Looks great from here. He is so right. Great stuff."
Maybe with some PR boost lines fed to them from the DNR to fill in the segment time.
The government does not have the right to change the terms of a valid, binding contract between two parties. If it wants to give money to people with student loans, that is a direct payment from the government, which is socialism.
And that’s where we are going.
Obama is starting to look like a reasonable Moderate.
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