Let's talk about fairness.
Forgiving student loan debt can be a small, first step toward righting a long history of inequity.
Dear friends: As someone who has made career in higher education - a deeply engaging and satisfying career - I wanted to add my voice to the conversation about student loan forgiveness.
First, what I will not discuss: the economics of higher education over the last few decades (other than a reminder that state support for public colleges and universities has shrunk dramatically). For a more in-depth discussion based on good data, I recommend Robert Reich’s “Wealth and Poverty” class seminar on inequities in education (see link after the photo).
And I won’t go into the impact of loan forgiveness on inflation, except to remind us that the result is not ten or twenty thousand dollars put into folks’ pockets all at once. It will result in savings realized incrementally over the (typically) decades of loan repayments.
Instead, I want to address the attacks on student loan forgiveness as being “unfair.” In this perspective, asking taxpayers to cover the costs of loans that funded education, a pathway to greater wealth, is inherently unfair. Each individual with a student loan benefits from the education it bought, they say, and should be accountable for paying it back. “We” shouldn’t fund “their” boost upward in economic status.
So let’s talk about fairness.
Who has to take out the highest loans to cover the cost of college? Who needs college or other post-secondary education the most to generate economic opportunity, because they lack family connections or other means of advancement? Who struggles the most to complete college degrees on time, due to the bewildering maze of degree requirements, financial aid, combined with personal responsibilities?
Folks whose families and communities have been historically excluded from economic advancement. Excluded by structural racism and systemic poverty, for example.
And who, for decades, have benefitted the most from a tax code that prioritizes taxing income generated from labor rather than income from wealth - all while folks who use the earned-income tax credit, one of the few ways to help working people reduce their tax burden?
The vanishingly small, unthinkably wealthy few. (For more information on this: an interview with journalist Jessie Eislinger of Pro Publica on Fresh Air this week: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1119412217)
What this all adds up to is the decidedly un-astonishing fact that our federal tax system has been unfairly skewed to the wealthy; and the burden of paying for a post-secondary education to build economic resilience has fallen unfairly on marginalized and excluded groups.
And higher education is part of that inequity. My industry has been far too slow and far too tradition-bound, far too invested in the structural inequities that create a privileged class, and far too willing to shrug off our responsibility for delivering a learning environment that rights those inequities. This is why, legitimately, many Americans question whether their tax dollars should go to pay for the college educations of a few.
My point is: those tax dollars already have paid the elite to send their heirs to college. For decades. Because the elite do not pay taxes on their wealth, while the rest of us pay taxes on the earnings of our labor.
Forgiving the loan debt that has burdened too many folk for too long is not, in and of itself, unfair. It is, in a small way, righting a long history of unfairness.
I am so grateful for your company on this journey.