It was a shock when the Supreme Court blocked President Biden’s plan to cancel up to $20,000 for student loan borrowers. Biden responded with an alternate route to debt cancellation using the Higher Education Act, including a negotiated rulemaking and notice-and-comment period that will likely take many months.
Unsatisfied with this plan B, a coalition of 179 organizations led by the Student Borrower Protection Center urged Biden to instead enact a new plan “as swiftly as possible” to deliver on his $20K-relief promise. Meanwhile, another national group is determined to defeat 13 vulnerable Republican U.S. House representatives (including Lauren Boebert) in 2024 because they opposed Biden’s plan.
To understand the level of hypocrisy built into denying student loan debt relief, travel back to 2011 when Occupy Wall Street camps blossomed everywhere during the Great Recession. We broke the American taboo on discussing class and capitalism. We chanted, “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out!” We denounced a grasping, greedy and somewhat dim financial elite and their paid-off politicians.
America forgave the debt of major banks and financial institutions in 2008, preventing something worse. The government could have nationalized those institutions and punished the big shots for their incredible irresponsibility. That didn’t happen. But the government had to do something.
Occupy signs read, “I Am Not A Loan!” Why did so many people have enormous student loan debt? A study by the U.S. General Accounting Office concluded that less than 1% of student loan recipients defrauded creditors. No, this glut of debt was the result of orchestrated predation, not individual moral turpitude.
To appreciate the long game, travel further back to 1967. The just-elected governor of California, Ronald Reagan, declared the state had “no business subsidizing intellectual curiosity.” He had campaigned against “beatniks, radi-cals and filthy speech advocates” on college campuses as well as the professors and administrators who didn’t crack down on student dissent.
The purpose of universities started to change with Reagan’s speech, according to Dan Berrett in a 2015 piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education. The following week, editors of the Los Angeles Times warned that Reagan’s budget cuts and “tampering” with higher education threatened to create second-rate institutions.
“If a university is not a place where intellectual curiosity is to be encouraged, and subsidized,” the editorial board wrote, “then it is nothing.”
Berrett says Reagan “crystalized what has since become conventional wisdom about college. In the early 1970s, nearly three-quarters of freshmen said it was essential to them to develop a meaningful philosophy of life. About a third felt the same about being very well off financially. Now those fractions have flipped. … A farmer reading the classics or an industrial worker quoting Shakespeare was at one time an honorable character. Today’s news stories lament bartenders with chemistry degrees.”
After World War II, higher education became a public good as many more people were able to go to college. Universities had low or no tuition. Some 30 years later in California, Reagan was determined to end tuition-free higher education with help from his education adviser Roger A. Freeman.
A week before Reagan’s reelection as governor of California in 1970, the San Francisco Chronicle quoted Freeman saying, “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. … That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go to college].”
Political economist Julian Jacobs, writing in Jacobin, argues that young people today face a precarious future. There’s a large gap between the earnings of a high school educated worker and a worker with a bachelor’s degree. Increasingly, a college degree is necessary.
But you have to go into debt.
“The total tuition burden is far greater than available scholarship and grant funding,” Jacobs writes. “So as a simple question of resources, it is impossible for most students to avoid taking on debt when they attend college.”
Things are going to get much worse if there isn’t drastic change. Jacobs explains:
“…[T]uition prices have increased by over 500% since the 1980s, significantly outpacing income growth. For a majority of students, this increase in tuition has also outpaced growth in their returns on college degrees. And this manifests in a rising inability to pay off loans among each successive class of students. The result is that too many students are currently paying too much for programs that offer them far too little.”
In June, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) reintroduced their College for All Act, which would make community college and public vocational schools tuition-free for all students, while making any public college and university free for students from single-parent households making less than $125,000 or couples making less than $250,000.
The bill would increase federal funding to make tuition free for most students at universities that serve non-white groups, such as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).
It would be paid for by taxing Wall Street speculators.
This is a step toward justice.
This opinion does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.
