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I do my best to refrain from political horse race punditry, because I think it’s largely a waste of time.
Most analyses and the way they’re read are weighed down by individual ideological priors. (I’m as prone to this as anyone.) Mostly, though, while there are certainly discernible patterns election to election, it seems that to a significant degree, every election is sui generis. I honestly have no idea what approach to issues and messaging will give my preferred candidates the best chance to win the day in 2022 and 2024, and I’m not sure anyone else does, either.
That said, one thing I am confident Democrats must do between now and the next election if they want a shot at holding Congress is … something.
Yes, Democrats must do something. Alternatively, they must do anything. If they don’t do something/anything, I do not feel good about their chances when the vote is largely a referendum on the years when their party held power.
Thanks to a couple of senators who have the power to either kneecap or pass something that passes as Joe Biden’s agenda, it’s looking like Congress literally might do nothing.
One thing Democrats could do -- or specifically one Democrat, President Joe Biden, could and should do -- is to announce the cancellation of student loan debt currently held by the federal government.
If you think this is not a good idea because it is a regressive giveaway to rich people, or creates a moral hazard, or is somehow inconsistent with the moral order of our country, I urge you to listen to Tressie McMillan Cottom, as guest host of The Ezra Klein Show, interviewing University of Iowa professor of sociology Louise Seamster.
The interview is worth listening to simply as a model for the academic conversation, an exchange between parties in which the audience emerges more knowledgeable than when we started. Those discourses are rare in the public sphere, and to see such a wonderful example is highly welcome. It literally elevated my mood.
But more importantly, they make a case for the cancellation of student loan debt and public financing of postsecondary education that is as thorough and clear as one could hope for. Having written an entire book arguing for the cancellation of student loan debt and public financing of public postsecondary education, I figure I’ve done my fair share of thinking about the intersection of labor, higher ed institutions, learning and postgraduate employment, but there was clearly more to consider. While I found the conversation uplifting, I also kept thinking how I wished I could go back and add in quotes and citations from it to the book.
The biggest fresh takeaway for me was how Black borrowers have been disadvantaged in ways that aren’t immediately apparent looking solely at the amounts of student loan debt being held. Cottom notes that between 2010 and 2018, while student debt for white borrowers has almost doubled ($12,000 to $23,000), for Black borrowers it has quadrupled ($7,000 to $30,000).
More importantly, Seamster’s research has demonstrated how the wealth gap between Black and white borrowers means not all debt is created equal.
As Seamster reports, white households at the median have 10 times the wealth of median Black households. If you have more wealth behind you, taking on student loan debt is simply not as burdensome. In that case, you’re using debt to leverage more future wealth.
On the other hand, if you’re a borrower without household wealth behind you, and the debt must be serviced with an increase in earning power, trouble is likely coming in the case of something like a recession, as has now happened twice in the last 15 years. The ability to take on debt is an advantage for white borrowers. For Black borrowers it creates a scenario where the slightest bobble can erase whatever advancement might be in the offing. For this reason, Seamster argues that while canceling debt will have a benefit for all, it will be even greater for Black households.
Another takeaway from the conversation is that it is almost certainly within the authority of the executive branch to cancel federally held student loan debt. This debt is literally ours, owned by the public, and it is in the power of the federal government to renegotiate this debt, just as it has for borrowers it has judged to have been defrauded by for-profit schools.
Rather than seeing cancellation as a giveaway to a select group, Seamster and Cottom urge us to instead view it as a kind of retroactive use of taxes to fund a public good. We should have and could have been financing public postsecondary education this whole time, and this is simply making it right. As Seamster notes, this is also an important step to addressing how we finance postsecondary education going forward so we don’t wind up in the same spot another 20 years from now: “This should be an acknowledgment that we did this wrong, and we did this in a way intentionally designed to discipline and punish people into debt structure.”
The way that this debt structure has been internalized by students, professors and institutions is perhaps the most thought-provoking part of the discussion. Those of us who work inside institutions and have had a chance to observe students will recognize where Cottom and Seamster discuss students who are too busy trying to survive, doing the bare minimum in class while juggling outside responsibilities and employment -- “a marathon run at a sprint,” as Seamster puts it.
I’m thinking here of a first-year student, a military veteran who admitted he was not doing well in school because he was delivering sandwiches for Jimmy John’s until 4:00 a.m., not leaving any time for sleep prior to our 8:00 a.m. class. He said it was often easier to just power through and not sleep at all before class, which turned into not sleeping at all, period. This is a student who even had some GI benefits to help pay for college but did not have enough money to also pay for life.
He’d joined the military because of the educational benefits he would later receive, and here he was, unable to learn because of the conditions we’d set for him.
That the people who cannot afford college should have to suffer to deserve it is an affront to the values we claim for our institutions and even the country itself.
One man could undo a significant injustice with a stroke of the pen.
I can see a scenario where such a bold action plays to the Democrats’ electoral advantage in 2022. I can also see a scenario where it is demonized and becomes an electoral liability.
But forget that. It is simply the right thing to do. It will benefit tens of millions of citizens directly and the rest of us indirectly. It will make possible a society that sees education as something valuable enough to be freely available.
Win or lose, at the very least, President Biden will be able to look back and know that at least he did something when it was in his power to act.
