What the Student-Loan Debate Overlooks
A core conservative critique of President Joe Biden’s executive action on student-debt forgiveness is that the plan requires blue-collar Americans to subsidize privileged children idly contemplating gender studies or critical race theory at fancy private colleges.
That idea, articulated by Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, among others, aims to portray the GOP as the party of working Americans and Democrats as the champions of the smug, well-educated elite. But it fundamentally misrepresents who’s attending college now, where they are enrolled, and the reasons so many young people are graduating with unsustainable debt.
[Read: A Democratic economist’s case against Biden’s student-loan plan]
Many factors have contributed to the explosion in student debt, but one dynamic is almost always overlooked: the erosion of the commitment to affordable public higher education as an engine for upward mobility that benefits the entire community.
Contrary to the stereotype conjured by critics, the number of debtors from public colleges today (about 22 million) exceeds the number from private and for-profit colleges (about 21 million), . One reason so many of those students from public schools are in debt is for funding higher education from taxpayers to students—precisely as more of those students are minorities reared in families on the short side of the nation’s enormous racial wealth gap.
