In his late March announcement speech, Messam, a 44-year-old former college football player, put student debt front and center, saying that if elected he would push for national student debt forgiveness. You get $50,000 in student-loan debt relief. The politics of free college are similarly fraught.
Presidential elections are decided by many things: media exposure, financial backing, personal chemistry, timing and luck. Policy positions often are just a way of signaling where a candidate stands on the political spectrum. But 2020 is shaping up to be different, the most ideas-driven election in recent American history. On the Democratic side, a robust debate about inequality has given rise to ambitious proposals to redress the imbalance in Americans’ economic situations.
That’s a staggering amount of money: about 7 percent, in fact, of the total federal debt. It wasn’t always thus. Just 10 years ago, America’s overall student-debt burden was $675 billion; 10 years before that, it was less than $100 billion. No wonder, too, that nearly all of the 2020 Democratic presidential contenders say they want to fix the problem.
For the next couple of decades, the new system seemed to work relatively well. But as more and more students chose to pursue a higher education, alarm bells began to sound. “Experts ... say that record borrowing for college threatens the financial stability of a generation of young people and their families,” the New York Times reported in 1987.
Their proposals fall into two broad categories: 1) help for people currently struggling with student debt and 2) reforms that will shield future generations from debt crises of their own. Eventually, though, Clinton adopted something like Sanders’s position — with one important tweak. Instead promising to cover public-college tuition for everyone, she limited the program to families making $125,000 or less.
Others may go in a more nuanced direction. In March 2018, Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz introduced his Debt-Free College Act, which differs from Sanders’s original proposal in that it wouldn’t cover public-college tuition at all income levels, but also from Clinton’s, in that it would cover ancillary expenses, such as room and board, as well as tuition.
And then there’s the other half of the equation to consider: What to do about all the Americans already drowning in student debt? Yet by far the highest-profile proponent of student-debt cancellation is Elizabeth Warren. In April, Warren introduced a college affordability plan. One half was fairly familiar: eliminating the cost of tuition and fees at every public two-year and four-year college in America while expanding Pell Grants by $100 billion over the next 10 years to cover nontuition expenses and give lower-income and middle-class students a better chance of graduating without debt.
Complicated, to say the least. Republicans have occasionally acknowledged the student-debt crisis and gestured at policy solutions, with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio taking the lead; last week, he introduced legislation that would eliminate interest on federal student loans in favor of a one-time financing fee that would be paid over the life of the loan and not accumulate with age. Even Donald Trump has addressed the issue, proposing a fairly liberal repayment plan during the 2016 campaign.
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