Student loan debt relief is only a Band-Aid solution

Credit: Owen Lavine

My dad and I sat slouched over his computer on a warm summer night a few months before the start of my junior year of college. We had been browsing my school’s financial aid website crunching every number. We were trying to squeeze me through college on the thinnest budget possible.

It had been an inevitability that I would incur some debt before I finished my education. By no stretch of the imagination do I come from modest means, but my family is too rich to be poor and too poor to be rich. Thus, we have lived in the precarity of a middle-class American household.

After a few hours, we arrived at a number that would suffice to cover the rest of my college education — $38,978 at an 3.14% annual percentage rate.

“Where did that eight come from?” I asked, finally breaking through the slurry of fatalistic anxieties polluting my head for a brief moment.

It was a tough pill to swallow. Dropping out of school was surely not an option for me. Nearly a year later that number has shrunk slightly, thanks to the pause on interest payments for student loan debt initiated by the powers vested in the Department of Education granted to them by the HEROES Act of 2003.

The HEROES Act grants broad and sweeping powers to the Department of Education to amend and cancel student loan debt payments to those who have “suffered direct economic hardship as a direct result of a war or other military operation or national emergency.”

This law is pretty straightforward — the executive branch can cancel student loan debt during a national emergency, i.e., the Covid-19 pandemic.

However, last Aug. 24, when the Biden administration launched its student debt relief program, a slew of lawsuits against the plan began popping up across the country.

One lawsuit, Biden v. Nebraska, would find its way all the way up to the Supreme Court where the idea of “suffer(ing) direct economic hardship as a direct result of a war or other military operation or national emergency” would be debated.

I had already begun assessing alternative plans for paying off my student loan debt before the Roberts court struck down the relief program in June.

I think constantly about how hard I’m working or whether a last-minute career switch is feasible. It may sound entitled, but I thought college would be my golden ticket to at least a comfortable life.

Regardless of whether the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the law is correct, an overriding issue is that canceling some portion of student loan debt won’t solve the student loan debt crisis.

I had reserved my jubilation upon finding out about the $20,000 relief limit of the program. The average federal student loan debt borrower has $37,000 in student loan debt, and so do I. We would still be left with about half of our debt sinking in our pockets.

While the debt relief program would be of substantial help to my financial future, I would still be pushing half the Atlas stone. I find further chagrin that the Biden administration showed its ability to cancel student loan debt but restrained itself from canceling all student loan debt for no good reason. Beyond that, it is somewhat meaningless in the grand scheme of things to cancel this generation of borrowers’ debt because there will be students who borrow after us, but there is no insurance that they will be able to access such a relief program.

If we are serious about ensuring education is a human right, then removing the cost barrier should be the modus operandi. It seems the rest of the modernized world has figured it out; it’s time we follow in their footsteps and make college free for all.

The Biden administration’s relief program would have expunged roughly $500 billion of the outstanding $1.7 trillion of student loan debt, a fraction of the cost of tuition-free college for all in the United States, which carries a price tag of around $58 billion a year.

Our money could buy a lot more for a lot less — it’s time we reorient our focus away from short-term Band-Aid solutions and move instead move toward removing the cost barrier of higher education.

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Owen Lavine is a senior journalism student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and a member of EdSource’s California Student Journalism Corps.

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