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It's happening gradually, we're getting one step closer to hugging, to dancing, to shaking our neighbor's hand with every covid-19 vaccination, your local CVS is helping us get one step closer. So what do you want to be one step closer to a big wedding spin class?

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Share what you can't wait to do with hashtag one step closer and tag CVS Pharmacy. Here's to being one step closer to a better tomorrow. Today in the argument, imagine if we wiped away every American student loan debt, should we? The cost of higher education in America has skyrocketed in recent decades, and so have the student loans to pay for it. Americans are carrying more than one point seven trillion dollars in college debt. That's more than we owe credit card companies or auto lenders.

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Nearly 43 million of us are still paying off our college tuition. It's a crisis with massive consequences for our economy and for millions of Americans who made, quote, the right decision to get an education. President Biden campaigned on forgiving 10000 dollars of debt for everyone. Democrats have been pushing for more. Clearly, some relief is on the table, but what's the most fair way to do it?

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I'm Jane Kostin, and this is one of those debates I have to be skeptical of my own opinion on as someone with sizable student loan debt that I have no idea when I'll finish paying off. My first reaction is yes, please cancel my debt. I will happily invest that money elsewhere in our economy. But I especially want to position benefits me, I know to be extra critical. So I brought together two people who feel very strongly that the crisis is real and needs fixing.

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But that's about where their agreement stops.

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Astra Taylor co-founded an organization called the Debt Collective, which pushes for total cancellation of debts for all. Sandy Baum is a nonresident senior fellow for the Center on Education Data and Policy at the Urban Institute. She thinks universal debt cancellation isn't progressive at all. In fact, it's regressive. Needless to say, they deliver on our show's title. I'm still sweating. Let's start with a personal question. Do either of you have student loans or student loan debt? Sandy, you first.

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I went to college many, many years ago. My kids had some student loan debt. They have paid it off. So no. And Astra, I actually don't have any student loan debt. But about 10 years ago, I did so right after the Great Recession. I owed forty two thousand and I defaulted. So I experienced that punitive measure because overnight my balance went up 19 percent and my credit was even worse. And then I had a change of fortune.

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Turned out my partner is a popular musician. He went back on the road and he paid off my student debt. So I've experienced both the trauma of default and the benefit of suddenly having that debt disappear. That is the most romantic thing I have ever heard. It was pretty sweet, right? That's beautiful.

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So as Senator Elizabeth Warren and other people have made clear, this was not always the norm. How did we get here? Well, the first thing is that when you're trying to judge the magnitude of student debt and where there are problems, it's really more helpful to look at the amount that individual students owe than it is to look at the aggregate amount of debt. Obviously, colleges to be much cheaper. Tuition prices have gone up very rapidly, and that's part of the story.

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And we can talk about why that has happened. Another big part of the story is many more people go to college. Now, when I went to college, it was very rare that people whose parents couldn't pay went to college. You didn't have older adults going back to college so much. And if you couldn't afford it, you just didn't go right. Now we have a situation where we implemented lots of financial aid programs because we think that you should be able to go to college even if you can't afford it.

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You know, you should get granted. But borrowing to pay for college is reasonable in the sense that it's an investment and you can pay out of the return to your investment. And for most students, that works. But it doesn't work for everybody because for some people it just doesn't pay off. It may be that they don't finish a degree. It may be that they went to a school that cheated them. It may be that they graduated in a really bad time.

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There are lots of reasons why it doesn't pay off for everyone and we need to protect those people. But one reason that we have much more student debt is because many of the people going to college now wouldn't have the money to pay. Even if it were free tuition, they wouldn't have the money to live while they're in college. So it's a combination of it getting more expensive and partly because states and localities are not paying as much of their share as they used to.

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And part of it is who's going to college now? So I would tell the story slightly differently. There is a long tradition of education as a publicly funded good in the society. It goes right back to the foundation of our land grant colleges and universities with the moral act. I mean, look at something like the GI Bill that sent a lot of veterans to college for free. Look at the famous California master plan, which created a beautiful three tiered system of education for the people of California.

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So actually what's happened is we just took a wrong turn by using loans to finance education. There has been, as Sandy just said, a divestment state. Investment in education and higher education has diminished and tuition has filled that gap. And what we've done is we've created this very complicated and I think very destructive system of of lending to fill that gap.

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I went to the University of Michigan, which in some ways viewed itself as being recession proof. And you hear this in a lot of college towns, that because the university operates as this giant employment center that is very much encouraged by the government and elsewhere. But you saw that while the state could not afford to fund University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Eastern Michigan, western Michigan, Northern Michigan, there are many directional universities in Michigan that tuition and even more so the fact that tuition is in some ways backed up by federal loans.

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The University of Michigan is able to keep on ticking, so to speak.

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But this was a political choice. If you look at California and I think it's important to begin there, you have then governor of California, Ronald Reagan, as a political project wanting to impose tuition. He was raising the fees of this state university precisely because there's something deeper going on, which is an attack on the idea that people are entitled to an education and an imposition of debt as part of a right wing economic project. And that is now the mainstream.

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Now we say, OK, this is just how you do things. Student loans have to exist instead of contextualizing it. So I think in some ways we can say, oh, wow, the idea of cancelling student debt is this radical demand. We can also say, no, it's a return to this egalitarian. Tradition of providing education for everyone on equitable terms because it's good for society as a whole. So there's a way in which we're saying that sounds so out of the box now is a restoration of these foundational principles.

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So I would argue that we never had an equitable system, as you describe it, in California, there were studies that California was the poster child for a regressive financing system. It wasn't that everybody went to college and it wasn't that everybody went to the same college. I mean, the demographics of who goes to the University of California versus who goes to the California community college system are very different. So the state, even though tuition has gone way up, the state spends much more per student on those who go to the University of California.

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If you can get into Berkeley and you're going to stay there for four or five years, you're getting a huge subsidy. Do you end up at the community college? You're getting a small subsidy. And who ends up at the community college? Those people from less affluent households. So really, one of the things that makes people think that it's equitable for people to pay some tuition is the distribution of those benefits that we don't think that all these people from rich backgrounds who are going to end up being the rich people in the end deserve to have huge subsidies when we really need to help people, you know, in early childhood education, we need to fund community colleges better, but we need to fund our K-12 environments in their neighborhoods and their health care so they'll have a better opportunity to go to Berkeley themselves.

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Right. But the spread between Berkeley then and a junior college of college or whatever it was then, is less probably than the spread between Harvard or Yale and for profit colleges, which is what we have at a national level. Right. Which is the system that's evolved. So I totally agree. The University of California system in the 60s and 70s wasn't sort of the ideal we should reach towards. But I think we should build on that model in that principle of public education for everyone.

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And perfect that instead of going further down the track, we're currently on Estra. A lot of your activism around this subject was sparked by the 2011 Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. Can you tell me a little bit about the history of the activism centered around student loan debt? And why do you think this has been such a focal point? What are the things we aren't doing because we are thinking about our student loans? Yes, it's twenty twenty one. Occupy Wall Street was 2011.

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So 10 years I've been in this movement. And what drew me to it was a kind of insight that something in our economy has changed. We are increasingly indebted and people are indebted for the necessities of life. So we have the debt finance our education. We have to put our medical bills on our credit cards because we don't have universal health care. And the problem is wages have stagnated. That's actually the bigger context for this conversation about student debt.

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So wages have stagnated, people are borrowing and there's kind of an illusion of broadly shared prosperity. But in reality, households are deeply indebted. Part of what that does is it individualise is right. It's your student loans for your education. It's your bill at the end of the month to the credit card company. But this isn't tens of millions of people making bad personal choices. This is a structural issue. This is about the way our economy is organized.

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And so we came together at Occupy Wall Street and we said, well, well, then what if debtors actually instead of being isolated instead of defaulting alone like I did, what if we came together and made demands for a different system, a system that actually worked better for everyone? And so part of that is actually just first about getting over the stigma. People have so much shame and stress about their debt. And I see that in the collective we have people reaching out in absolutely desperate situations economically, but also psychologically.

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We have people saying that they think about killing themselves because they are so indebted and they can't get by it. Also in a kind of less dramatic way than that does influence people's life choices. We see that people make career decisions based on their debt. There's data showing that people graduating from law school, for example, want to go into public interest careers, but then they realize, hold on, I can't pay off my two hundred thousand dollars in debt working for fifty or sixty thousand dollars a year at some nonprofit.

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So I'm going to pursue corporate law. We know from professional associations that there's a crisis where there aren't enough dentists or doctors in rural areas because they have to go and pursue careers in places that are more populated and go into specialties where they can actually pay their massive student debt. It has a perverse impact on people's life choices. And Sandy, doesn't that have repercussions for the economy if people aren't buying houses because they can't pay both a mortgage and their student loans?

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Isn't that much debt bad for the economy? And hypothetically, a student loan free me would be more likely to be interested in making those major purchases that are the main drivers of our economy. You really have to differentiate different kinds of debt. I mean, to me, the fact that people have medical debt. That we don't have a health care system that supplies health care to everyone. Instead of asking them to pay for it out of nothing, that is unconscionable.

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We shouldn't have that. If the movement would ever forgive medical debt, I'd be like, yeah, we should never have medical debt. We should make sure in the future that no one ever has to borrow for that. The income distribution of people with medical debt is really different from the income distribution of people with college debt. If you're asking about the impact, first of all, many of the studies about the impact of student debt are significantly flawed.

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And one problem, I think, when you ask this question is what's the counterfactual? So if you want to say, look, people who went to college have higher homeownership rates, some people who didn't because they have higher incomes and higher wealth than people who didn't. In your situation, personally, if someone had paid for you to go to college and you didn't have to borrow and you have the education you have in the job you have, you would be much better off.

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Of course I would be so happy. Yeah, there are things you're not doing because you have to make loan payments. That's I mean, everyone knows that look. So so that's clear. And if you compare the financial situation of people whose parents paid to people whose parents didn't, it's not just that they don't have college loans. Their parents are also giving them a down payment for a house. They're doing all kinds of things for them that other parents don't.

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And that's not fair. And that's our society at large. That's not about college. So the choice that people have to make is frequently, should I borrow money and go to college and get an education and have better opportunities? Or should I say, you know what, I'm not going to take out loans. I'm not going to college. People are much better off borrowing money, going to college, getting a benefit of a college education, even if they have to pay back their student loan.

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So it would be terrible for the economy if people stopped going to college. And I just want to point out that we have income based repayment systems. They're not perfect by any means. They need to be strengthened and improved and all of that. But what we need to do is make sure that if you can't afford your payments, you don't have to make them. We have a system that will forgive the debt of people who can't afford it. It really needs to be strengthened.

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But to suggest that nobody should be able to borrow money, I mean, who wouldn't have a house if you couldn't borrow money for a mortgage? It would be that you would not need to borrow money to go to college. Tuition should be cheaper. Absolutely. But even if there were no tuition, who's going to pay for you to live while you're in college if your parents can't afford it? And again, the people who go to college for a long time to expensive colleges are people who are relatively affluent.

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About half of the student debt that people are taking out is for graduate school. Is graduate school going to be free? Is Harvard going to be free? I mean, really, I mean, people are going to still borrow money for college because it's a good investment. So there's so much here to unpack. We have a society where you have to get credentialed to get a job. You have to get a bachelor's degree to get the job used to be able to get with a high school degree.

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If you are black, you have to get a bachelors degree to compete with a white candidate who lacks the same degree. So we have a system that's driving people to credentials. Part of that to me is that, you know, education has been twisted into primarily job training. Right. We think of it as, you know, you take out your loans to invest in yourself so you can get a job so you can pay back those loans. I want to just break that paradigm and say, no, education is actually about education.

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This is why it should be free career training as part of that. Right. And cultivating this kind of expertise as part of that. But there's actually something bigger. And we need to go back to this idea of funding education as something that is good for a democratic society. Sandy, I think, would say that cancelling student debt is regressive because some high earners would get their debts canceled. I want to dispute that and say student debt itself is regressive.

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People whose parents are millionaires and billionaires do not have to take out student loans to go to college. They pay the tuition, so they end up paying less for the same degree than people who have to borrow, who have to take out student loans, because those borrowers pay over time, they pay for years and decades and they are charged interest. So they often pay many times more over the course of the life of their loan. So student debt itself is regressive, which is why cancelling it is a progressive policy.

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And we do have these systems. We have systems like IDR, which is income driven repayment. We have a public service loan forgiveness. To say that they kind of need to be fixed is an understatement. These programs are completely broken. I work with debtors every day who are tortured by these programs, people who have planned their entire adult lives planning to get public service, loan forgiveness, and then they didn't get it. 99 percent of people have been denied the public service loan forgiveness.

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They plan their lives around. Sure, you can be an income driven repayment and be making technically zero dollars a payments on your loans, but you've still got this screwed up debt to income ratio. You're still got terrible credit. It's still hanging over you. You know that you actually are worth less. And zero, these fixes are complicated, they're bureaucratic, there are all of these unnecessary administrative costs and it's like I think the question we need to ask is like, why?

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Why put so much energy into fixing a broken student loan servicing system instead of just going like, let's go back to something that's obvious, which is so funding education in a different way if you were to forgive all student debt. Now, it's absolutely regressive. It's not regressive because some rich people would get some money. When people talk about the racial wealth gap, about half of black adults have never been to college. They don't have any student debt.

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If we wanted to give everybody a ten thousand dollar distribution, I think that would be a great idea. I do, too. I would do that, too. I'm not worried about the fact that we're going to give ten thousand dollars to Bill Gates. That's OK. Give it to everybody. But do not exclude the people who never went to college. Many people never went to college because they couldn't manage to afford it for lots of reasons. They deserve this ten thousand dollar handout as well.

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Think about the money we're talking about spending on helping people with children. We got to do something about child poverty. And if we do something about child poverty, it's going to help people get to and through college. I mean, I think picking on the idea that it's going to help some rich people, that's not the problem. Public service, loan forgiveness, no argument. It's a disaster. Of course, we have a huge problem with that.

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If you forgave all student debt today, then what about tomorrow? And again, free tuition is not going to eliminate borrowing. People are going to borrow for graduate school, for private colleges and to live while they're in college. So what about the people who just paid off their loans? What about the people who are going to borrow tomorrow? You know, there are some people who should be forgiven. So if you borrowed ten thousand dollars and you've been trying to repay it for 10 years, you haven't made any progress.

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We should forgive it today. We shouldn't make you wait another 10 years. If you were the victim of fraud or abuse. We should forgive your debt if you're a parent living below the poverty line and we gave you a federal loan so you could help your kid go to college, we should never have made that loan to you. We should forgive it, but we should not forgive the trillion and a half dollars of student debt and increase the federal debt that way and put all that money in the pockets of many of the people who have the most earning potential in our society.

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I think that misunderstands the true economics of it, because we're not in a position where we're choosing between ten thousand dollars to the people versus debt cancellation. Debt cancellation is a policy that can happen because of executive actions, that the administration can do it now. So it will increase student debt. Forget about the ten thousand dollars to some people and not other people. But the money the Department of Education's lent to people is out the door. That money is already gone.

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And as you just said, we have systems that basically bake in debt cancellation or forgiveness. We're just punting it to decades in the future. Why not face the fact that the vast majority of this is not going to be paid off when it is collected is through incredibly punitive means with garnish the Social Security payments of elderly people because their tax returns should not do that. We should not we put people in default as I was put into default and then my principle increased.

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We have to understand that this money, when it is recouped, is recouped through these pernicious and punishing methods. Why do that? Why not just say, let's cancel this? Even if we canceled some of the numbers on the table? Ten thousand dollars. Fifty thousand dollars, we would still have a student loan crisis. We're getting into solutions. And I like that. We want to like our last point of solution, of total forgiveness. First, there are a couple of stops on the road before we get there.

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And you just mentioned the most recent proposal from President Biden, which is a ten thousand dollar unilateral cancellation for all federal dollars, which would wipe out the debt for about 15 million Americans, which is not a small number of people. So what are your thoughts on ten thousand dollars? I feel like we're doing a bit of an auction here, but ten thousand dollars. Take it or leave it. Oh, absolutely. I mean, that's part of why there does need to be a group holding down the corner for full cancellation.

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There has to be people on on that flank. I mean, ten thousand dollars is nibbling around the edges. I think it shows, though, for me as an organizer in the space, I feel that the fact President Biden ran on that is a testament to the work of standing up for themselves and saying this is a crisis and we do want to fight that. He also ran on the promise to cancel student debt for undergraduates who attended public universities and historically black colleges and universities as long as their income was under one hundred twenty five thousand.

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So that's that's more substantial. Some of the other proposals that have come from Senators Schumer and Warren talking about canceling fifty thousand dollars in student loans. Again, this cattle auction continues. But for those who earned less than one hundred twenty five thousand, what do you think of these positional moves, Sandy?

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Well, I would rather have them forgive ten thousand dollars of everybody's debt than fifty thousand dollars of everybody's debt. And the share of people who owe fifty thousand dollars is small. But again, I want them to give ten thousand dollars to everyone. And it would be a very interesting question. How many people would use the tenth? Thousand dollars to pay off their student loans, first of all, in terms of a stimulus or helping people right now, let's acknowledge that since the beginning of the pandemic, no one has had to pay their federal student loans.

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All of those payments have been deferred. You don't have to pay them. No interest is accumulating. And if they forgive your debt, they're not handing you money. It's a stream of you don't have to make future payments. So in terms of helping the economy right now, it doesn't help anybody right now because nobody is making those payments. When I get the email that tells me that my loan forbearance on my federal loans because I also have private loans, which is a more rare scenario.

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But, you know, very fun for me when I get that email telling me I don't need to make those payments, I do think awesome. That means that when at some point we are allowed to go places, I would have the opportunity to go somewhere or buy a thing. Or when you think about the budgeting that is done, I have spent the last decade of my life figuring into my budget that here's how much money I make. Here is how much money I actually make because of my student loan payments.

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But if I get that back, I am thinking we could do X thing, we could do Y thing. So I just want to press you a little bit on this, because it is not that I am literally being given, you know, ten thousand dollars. It is that my possibilities, my economic possibilities widen. You will be a happier person. Absolutely. I don't begrudge you that. I love happy people who are struggling most. Now, look at think about who's lost their jobs during the pandemic.

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Think about who's not sitting on June, you know, going to work. I mean, the people who are struggling the most now are not the people. Most of them don't have student debt because they didn't go to college. Some of them do. But mostly they have lots of other problems. They have other kinds of debt. They can't pay their electric bills. So if you want to have an agenda, maybe we can argue about whether we could do everything, everything, everything we want to.

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I want to invite you into the debt collective where we we organize to cancel all these other kinds of debt. Sandy, because I'm 100 percent with you that all of these other debts need to be canceled. But people, student debtors hold these other debts. They hold medical debts, they hold credit card debt. If you cancel debt, you got to solve the problem in a different way. If people can't borrow money, people aren't going to pay back their loans.

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Nobody's going to lend them money. And we have loans for a reason because people can distribute payments over time. We need a much more equal society. But not allowing people access to credit is not going to be a solution long term to problems. And everybody needs a home. Everybody needs a place to live. Why shouldn't we do away with housing debt? Let's forgive all the mortgage debt.

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This is kind of going from Brooklyn, New York. They have been arguing about school debt forgiveness and the way that I've been coming out. This is more from the social Democratic perspective and I believe in a strong welfare state. By that metric. I see debt forgiveness as more of a bailout to the elite institutions and a bailout or forgiveness to the students who were ripped off by them banks.

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What are you arguing about with your family, your friends, your frenemies? Tell me about the big debate you're having and a voice about by calling three four seven nine one five, four, three, two, four. And we might play an excerpt of it on a future episode.

[00:25:56]

HBO presents Q Into the Storm, a new six part documentary series charting a labyrinthine journey to unmask the person behind Kuhnen from executive producer Adam McKay and directed by Cullen Hoback. The series chronicles a three year global investigation and the evolution of the anonymous character known as Q. While weighing the consequences of unfettered free speech permeating the Internet's darkest corners, unprecedented access reveals how Kuis uses information warfare to manipulate the Internet politics and people's thinking. Kuis into the storm is now streaming on HBO Max.

[00:26:31]

I'm Jenna Wortham, I'm Wesley Morris, we are two culture writers at The New York Times and we host a podcast called Still Processing. And every week we talk about the way popular culture connects to life.

[00:26:43]

And right now we're talking about the N-word, a word that my most rebellious, youthful self loved using, but recently just started to feel Courtauld coming out of my mouth. I've never used it. I still can't believe that. I mean, it's been used on me, but I have never used it. We're going deep into why in this episode and into our cultural relationship with this word, too. It's an awful word. And yet it's still with us after all this time.

[00:27:11]

And how we use it is still debated even in our friendship. So we talk about that, too. You can listen to still processing wherever you get your podcasts and you can listen to this episode right now.

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One of the pieces of this is that only about 62 percent of people graduate from college with a bachelor's degree. They do it in six years, but thirty eight percent withdraw. And millions of those people who withdraw, who did not finish college, who are the people who are likely with this pandemic being most impacted, the people who are not lucky enough to be able to do so much of their work at home or for whom working at home does not exist.

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They still have millions of dollars of student loan debt. But for the idea of a proposal that says we will forgive about 50000 thousand dollars, but if you make less than one hundred twenty five thousand dollars a year, does that make that more equitable in your eyes, Sandy? It makes it more equitable, but there are a lot of issues, like, for example, if you make one hundred twenty five thousand dollars a year, what if I mean, I think people who have been trying to repay for years and haven't succeeded because they have a long term low income need to have more debt forgiveness.

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But if you just graduated from college and you're making less than one hundred twenty five thousand dollars a year, this is a real windfall to you. So let's think about who really can't afford to pay. I don't want student loans to oppress people. People who drop out of college are the biggest problem struggle the most people who want to for profit institutions. We have lots of problems that we have to solve, whether their student debt or not. If you go to an institution that promises you, you're going to get a job at the end of it and you can't because they just are total rip off institution.

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This is outrageous. And we need to to to do something about this, whether you borrowed money for it or not. So it's not going to solve those problems to just forgive the debt of people who just left those schools. We need to solve those problems. They're going to be with us until we address them head on. It's not such a pie in the sky thing to imagine that people aren't financing their education through student loans. This is something that exists in other countries.

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In the beginning, when student loans just began, they were conceived as like a little bonus, right? I mean, Pell Grants typically covered tuition and gave people money to live on. So to address the like, how do people actually survive? Question loans are not the only way we can finance education. I think that that's really important to state. I want to just say on the for profit college fund I have organized for the last six years now with students who were defrauded by predatory for profit colleges.

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And this is why I am so adamant about the fact that the attempts to fix and improve the program and create more oversight and have some laws or more information for borrowers, they don't work. The systems that the Department of Education are holding are predatory. We've got millions of people trapped in huge debt for worthless degrees. And these for profits are the logical endpoint of this system of loan, finance, education and treating education as an investment in a commodity and not a public good.

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So I am very familiar with the trials and tribulations of the most vulnerable borrowers. And what those borrowers have helped teach me through my organizing with them is that we need a solution that actually helps everyone. We need to stop trying to divide people, you know, and say, oh, actually, well, let's not talk about these this kind of debt or that kind of debt or because when you do that, when you divide everybody up, it makes the problem seem smaller than it is.

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The fact is that for profit college students and doctors who can't pay their debts all owe money to the same system. They're all connected to the Department of Education. Most of them have federally secured loans. And the same solution will help everybody, which is for debt cancellation and fixing the solution. Going back to free public higher education is not a solution. It's not to suggest that the problems of people defrauded by their for profit institutions are the same as the problems of doctors who are right now in residency.

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In two hundred thousand dollars I'm going to be neurosurgeons is absurd. I mean, they are such different situations. There are timing problems. There are problems of being cheated and there are problems of being given opportunities. You make it sound as though it could just be a simple solution. It's not simple in the short term or not, but it's the problem with doctors who want to be general practitioners, doctors who want to not have to maximize their returns, doctors who don't make a lot of money.

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There are lawyers who don't make a lot of money. But the idea that the average taxpayer should pay for people with lots of money to go make lots of money instead of using tax revenues to actually create opportunities for people is so much not a progressive idea. Education has a social benefit. We live in what we call a democracy, and I think in 2021 has taught us anything. It's that we want an educated populace, right? We want people to be able to learn to learn how to think critically.

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So public K through 12 education made sense in the industrial age, right? This is the 21st century. People need more time to learn, more time to explore, you know, and and more time to develop these critical capacities. I want to interrupt there, because one of the challenges I have with this conversation is. Should we be talking about greater access to education, which seems to be your point or is part of the issue that about six in 10 jobs require some education beyond a high school diploma?

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The fact that there are so many jobs and I think we've all had them where you were basically required to have graduated from college, even at no point did your college education. Let's just say that my history thesis on Nazi propaganda before and after the Battle of Stalingrad didn't really come up that much was a lot of my early jobs. So is the challenge everyone should have access to this education or obviously there are a lot of jobs that require different forms of occupational licensing, but there are a lot of jobs that perhaps shouldn't need people to have college educations in the first place.

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We should worry about both of these things. Of course, everyone should have access to this educational opportunity, but it shouldn't be a requirement for a living wage. Right. Education, of course, has social benefits and even the private benefits everyone should have access to, but it has private and social benefits. It's not a public good. Like if I go to college, you live in a better, more educated society. But I get most of the benefits.

[00:33:35]

You don't get equal benefits and you're indifferent to whether it's me or you who goes to college. But the idea that we don't have good opportunities for people who don't go to college have lots of people when they graduate from high school, we hope they graduate from high school. Not everyone does. They don't want to go sit in a classroom again. They need an apprenticeship. They need opportunities for good jobs that don't require them to go to college. And we absolutely need to focus on that.

[00:34:00]

But we also need for them to have that choice where it's not financial constraints that make it impossible for them to go to college. So I think your dichotomy is like you're pointing out two things that we need to do. And if wages were not so unequal and we didn't live in a society where the people at the top of the distribution earn so much more than the people at the bottom, then you could make a choice based on what satisfies you in life instead of thinking you're going to be poor if you make a wrong choice.

[00:34:27]

We agree on this. Good jobs don't appear because you've mentored a lot of diplomas, right? Like we need to figure out how to create better jobs that create equity in the workforce. This isn't something that is solved by education policy. And I totally agree that you shouldn't need this arbitrary credential to get the job that a generation ago you could get right out of high school. So I think they're complementary problems. They overlap. And we've been on the wrong track by thinking that, oh, we can solve this problem of employment and wages just by pushing people in the door of colleges, whatever the cost is.

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But I do think that thesis that you wrote probably has helped you more than you think. It's not just about the subject matter. It's about how you learn to read and think and create. And I'm sure you're using that all the time. Horrifyingly, the subject matter came up a couple of times. I really wish it wouldn't have to be. So it was. So let's talk going forward, because after you've mentioned the idea of free public college for all and I want to talk about solutions that are actually possible with the Congress that we currently have.

[00:35:33]

So, Sandy, I'd like to start with you. If total cancellation isn't effective, if free public college, I'm going to guess it's not what you're thinking. What do you think we can do to reform higher education so more people have access to education but aren't crushed by debt? And how can we do so in a way that's fair? So I think that the federal government can play a larger role in funding public higher education by providing money to states that matches state appropriations so that states will have more incentive to more generously fund public higher education.

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The states don't just need to lower tuition, they need resources to make these institutions able to serve students. One of the problems with some of the free college proposals is, well, how are we going to educate all those students? How are we going to give them a quality environment so the federal government can do that? The federal government can certainly increase the size of the Pell Grant, which is financial aid for low and moderate income students. So students will have more grant aid to pay and the federal government must increase its oversight and regulation of the for profit college industry and hold colleges and universities accountable for the quality of the education that they provide to students.

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So this is a thesis I am completely prepared to be incorrect about, and you both can tell me that I'm wrong. It's an exciting part of the show because there is an expectation that you will be able to access student loans. They can set the price that whatever they want it to be. Thirty five thousand dollars a year, forty five thousand dollars a year with the understanding that you will probably qualify for federal loans without those loans. But those eliminated, do you think that colleges would lower their prices?

[00:37:07]

There's been a lot of research on this, maybe a little bit. Certainly the for profit sector, there's a lot of evidence that you raise the loan limits, they raise their prices. But by and large, the answer to that is no, that's not what is determining college prices. I mean, if states would put more funding into higher. Education than tuition at public institutions would be lower, but that is not what's driving it. And look, if we didn't have any student aid, some people want to abolish the Pell Grant for that reason, then probably prices would be lower.

[00:37:34]

There would be fewer colleges and universities and fewer people would go to college better. We should have a little bit higher price and have educational institutions with resources that can educate students. Cheap isn't enough. It has to be. What are you getting for your money? So this whole focus on what's the price and wouldn't a price of zero be great? It depends. It depends on what you're going to get for your price. Esther, I want to know what your thought is on with eliminating loans, reduce the price of college because colleges would know that you couldn't access a spare 20 thousand dollars.

[00:38:06]

I think we need state funding. We need federal funding for education.

[00:38:10]

So it sounds like you kind of agree on that. More money for education, more money for education. And there's the sixty six fix proposal in California, which basically says for a small increase in your state taxes, we can reinvest in the California system. So I think there are state possibilities that even if we're not about to get college for all from this Congress, and I think that we're not the fact we're not going to get college right from this Congress is part of why the debt collective is pushing for student loan cancellation via executive action.

[00:38:45]

Why free? Why free is the objective? I know you just said that we're not going to get it in this Congress, but I'm interested to hear why free at all.

[00:38:54]

I mean, I hear in the word free a double entendre, right? So one is free as in cost and the other is free as a name. That freedom. This is actually about creating a free and equal population that is capable of governing itself again. To me, this ties back to my interest in my work on the subject of democracy. What is society for cancelling student debt in 2021? The executive action, which Joe Biden can and should do, is one way of saying we've made a mistake.

[00:39:22]

This has been a policy failure and we're doing something about it. Of course, it's not the solution. We're figuring out what the real solution is. Let's do something as a society that's saying, hold on, this is out of control just to show that we can actually admit our mistakes and take some little step to getting back on track and building a system that actually aims at equity and actually functions and isn't destroying people's lives. So I think, you know, we share a lot of the same goals in terms of the kind of society we would like to see.

[00:39:54]

I think the idea of forgiving all student debt is so inequitable. It offends me so much to think of it as progressive because I want people to be thinking this way about policies that will really help the people who need it most. And the people who need the most help are not the people who have large amounts of student debt. So it's just a difference in what we see as a solution and a constructive step on the road to building a society where more people have equal opportunities and where subsidies just go mostly to people who really need them, not to people who have had the biggest benefits from our society.

[00:40:34]

But right now, we have a two tiered system where people who have family wealth get their tuition paid for. If you have student debt, you by definition do not have family wealth. Your parents aren't millionaires and billionaires. And if you are actually economically vulnerable, if you are as as the statistics say, you come probably from a black or Latino household, that debt drags you further and further and further into poverty. I mean, you know this.

[00:40:59]

I know you know this. In my mind, the racial frustrates me. I'm sorry, but it's just that it is not true that people from affluent families don't have student debt, that people with the largest debts are people who went to medical school and law school and so on. And that's not the people from the low income backgrounds. So I agree with you about the plight of the people who cannot afford it. I agree with you about the race issue is huge.

[00:41:21]

I mean, black students are disadvantaged in so many ways. And the student debt problem concentrated in that community is one that we have to address in lots of ways. But the idea that if you're not needy, you don't have student loans. That's just not the case. So I would like to bargain with Sandy and say, OK, you said ten thousand at some point. I'm saying all, you know, let's meet at seventy five k the research shows, the research shows that that's the ideal amount.

[00:41:49]

So Senator Warren and Schumer are saying that they want fifty thousand dollars of debt cancelled because of the racial wealth gap. The fifty thousand is based on research from 2016. The researchers updated the number because debt has grown and they're now saying actually the optimal debt cancellation to close the racial wealth gap is 75. So that gives you an example of the acceleration we're facing here.

[00:42:09]

How can the solution to the racial wealth gap be a policy that leaves half of African-American households totally out because they don't get America's spinoff people into the workforce? Nicely, because they need to compete on an even playing field with their white counterparts and so they disproportionately more debt is held by white people. Well, yeah, because there are more white people. Also speaking as a black person who went to college, black students are more likely to turn to student loans and are more likely to default on their loans.

[00:42:43]

Absolutely. Exactly. The assumption here, I would think, is that this is not our only bite at the apple on trying to close the racial wealth gap. The idea would be we would do this, but also thinking about housing reform, occupational licensing reform, eliminating qualified immunity. But, Sandy, you're shaking your head. You are still in disagreement here. It is true that more black students than white students borrow. We are not going to have a successful society unless we figure out how.

[00:43:12]

Look at the European countries that have student debt programs that work their income driven. They're not that different from ours, but they withhold it from your paycheck and and it's automatic. And you don't have to go through a bureaucracy. We can do that. We haven't chosen to do it, but we can do it. And it will be a long term solution if we can't structure good government programs that we're in a total mess because we're not going to solve any of these problems after you are shaking your head vehemently.

[00:43:37]

This is a very visual podcast. So vehemently. I mean, first I want to say that Derrick Hamilton, who is the leading economist on the racial wealth gap, says cancel all student debt for the maximum benefit. And he would, I know, would also say this is not our only bite at the apple. Right. This has to be coupled with all these policies. Why dream of some perfect bureaucracy where people take out loans and then they're automatically enrolled in the right payment plan?

[00:44:03]

I mean, let's go back to reality. The nightmares that people are living in because of these programs just make me feel like why would we aspire to making this Rube Goldberg machine work when we could fund things directly? We could give very generous Pell Grants, let people have the space to live that other countries do that. What is society for the stereotype of the doctor as a lawyer who might get their debts canceled? Is this a canard that's got to go?

[00:44:29]

We know that law school does not necessarily mean you're going to get a high paying job. If you want to go into public service, you're really, really underpaid. And the fact is, as a citizen of this country, I want there to be doctors and lawyers who aren't burdened by hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and can serve their community. I'm thinking of one member of the debt collective. His name's Armand Henderson. He's a doctor in Miami.

[00:44:54]

He grew up in Philadelphia. Black just right. He lives right above the poverty line. He six hundred thousand dollars for medical school and he spends every day going out and giving homeless people tests for covid. I mean, why so when you invoke this doctor who might get their debt cancelled, I'm like, yeah, Armon would be free to maybe plan for his retirement or buy a house. That's not such a terrible thing in my book. Yeah, but we can't use anecdotes like this very remarkable, unusual person to set public policies.

[00:45:20]

And if you forgave all student debt tomorrow, then next week there would be people with new student loans. So that's not a reason to keep people trapped just because the system's not solved. We don't go. Oh, well, you might get a break. It's not just it's we're talking about a huge impact on the debt and the deficit and limit. And if you don't think Congress is going to do less for people in need, because we just added, you know, a trillion and a half dollars over time to get us out the door is not the same spending that that is out the door.

[00:45:52]

And the government knows it's not going to get it back. That's why there's IDR. That's why there's loan forgiveness. So the government expects to get student loans repaid. It doesn't expect to get all of it back. The official estimates do not claim that all the money's coming up. All the money is not going to be paid back. But a significant share is that on average, they expect to make money. And when it doesn't get paid back, it adds to the debt.

[00:46:11]

And we're not to the point where Congress says, hey, people need that, we're just going to do it. There are absolutely tradeoffs and we have to acknowledge those tradeoffs. OK, this is the most I've thought about my own student debt and anyone else's student debt in a very long time in my life. Yes, student debt. It occupies your mind.

[00:46:37]

Dr. Sandy Baum is a nonresident senior fellow at the Center on Education Data and Policy at the Urban Institute. And Astra Taylor is a documentarian, author of the book Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone. And the co-founder of The Debt Collector, thank you both so much for joining me today to talk about this issue. Thanks so much. Thank you so much for having us. You can find links to their op ed about student loans.

[00:47:01]

And this episodes shown us if Oprah's interview with Prince Harry and Megan Markle has you and your royal feelings do it.

[00:47:09]

I did last weekend and take a deep dive into the work of Dr Lucy Worsley. She's a British historian who is the chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces, and she happens to be the queen of royal history. If you're new to Dr Wellesley, I recommend you stay. With her three episode mini series, Secrets of the Six was about Henry the Eighth and his ill fated partners, you can find all three episodes on PBS Dog. And I want to recommend you watch the work of our video team here at NYT Opinion.

[00:47:38]

Our OP Docs team spotlights short form opinionated documentary films from independent producers around the world. Two of the abductees are shortlisted by the Oscars for best documentary Short Subject. Check out a Concerto was a conversation and hysterical girl and all the other docs for free at New York Times dotcom slash op docs awards. That's NY Times dot com slash op Deacy s A.W. A.D.s.

[00:48:14]

The argument is a production of New York Times opinion, it's produced by phablet Alasia Gutierrez and Vishakha Darba, edited by Allison Bajak and Paula Schoeman with original music and sound design by Isaac Jones and fact checking by Kate Sinclair. Special thanks this week to Shannon Bastar and Viki Merrick.

[00:48:42]

You know, if only Sandy and I were the polls that were debating this, that would be excellent. So that's right. Yeah, that's true. I think we could get comedy, but alas, there's other people.