Biden’s big move on student loans only a first step toward making American college great again

From small things, mama, big things one day come. — Bruce Springsteen

Astra Taylor almost didn’t go to Occupy Wall Street on that fateful Saturday morning, Sept. 17, 2011. The then-31-year-old, slightly jaded veteran of New York City’s Bush 43-era protest scene was badgered by her mentor — David Graeber, a noted anthropologist who’d just published a book on debt’s pernicious effect on civilization — into heading down to Lower Manhattan. There, a wall of NYPD cops herded protesters against late-stage capitalism away from Wall Street and into a postage-stamp-size enclave called Zuccotti Park.

But Taylor was instantly hooked on the energy of the several hundred people who turned out that day and refused to leave the park, she told me recently in an interview for my book, After the Ivory Tower Falls. “I immediately knew something was different because I didn’t know everybody there,” she recalled. As Occupy Wall Street grew and spread to other cities across the U.S., Taylor discovered a bond shared by so many of these newcomers: Their dreams of adulthood were drowning in college debt, sometimes approaching six figures.

Before that memorable autumn, almost no one was talking about how the growing privatization of higher education that took off during the “Reagan revolution” of the 1980s had created a debt bomb that was then hitting $1 trillion and would soon surpass what the nation owed on all of its credit cards. In small working groups in that unlikely park and elsewhere, Taylor and these new protest kids changed the conversation. From small marches outside banks, or on sites like the Tumblr “We Are the 99 Percent,” their energy grew into the surging 2016 campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders — who promised to tax Wall Street to wipe out the debt and make college free — and finally reached a volume that 2020 Democratic nominee Joe Biden could not ignore.

When President Biden announced Wednesday that the federal government will free some 20 million Americans from the ball-and-chain of college debt and reduce the burden of 25 million more — by forgiving up to $10,000 in loans for everyone but high earners, and up to $20,000 for working-class Americans who’d qualified for Pell Grants — it was a stunning victory for activists who took the issue from a whisper to a scream in little more than a decade.

In the big picture, however, Biden’s somewhat-bolder-than-expected move is only one small step toward defusing a bigger crisis. That’s in part because Wednesday’s maneuver only shaves some $300 billion-plus off the debt mountain that has risen to an astronomical $1.75 trillion, still leaving a difficult path ahead for millions of other borrowers when pandemic-frozen payments resume in 2023. But it’s mainly because the bigger hill of expanding educational opportunity to all of America’s emerging adults, and making it free or affordable, remains unaddressed.

That said, this week will be remembered as one giant leap toward an idea that can change everything — the notion that higher education should be a public good, not the privatized rat race that has demoralized our rising generations.

» READ MORE: America’s real college debt: How we failed an entire generation

Although Taylor, now a leader of the nationwide Debt Collective, had been pushing for 100% cancellation, she still told me Wednesday that Biden’s announcement was “a milestone victory. It’s proof of debtor power. We forced a reluctant president’s hand. The biggest victory? Millions of people now think [$10,000 to $20,000] is not enough. We have totally shifted consciousness and raised expectations.”

Indeed, thoughts that Millennials and Gen-Zers, along with leading progressives like Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, would be disappointed that Biden has stopped well short of their push for a $50,000-or-higher figure gave way to a general mood of enthusiasm on the left — that this was not only good news but maybe a sign of more to come.

Teens and 20-somethings overloaded TikTok with celebratory videos, and a pro wrestler who taunted his opponent at an AEW Dynamite pro wrestling event in hip-hop verse that “we’ll wipe you out like Biden did student debt” got a huge roar from the kind of crowd that doesn’t normally cheer Democratic presidents. On her Substack newsletter, the writer Anne Helen Peterson collected anecdotes like this one:

“Because I got Pell Grants, my student loans have now halved. I have 12k left — and now there’s forgiveness after 10 years [of payments] — means it’s now likely my loans will be done in 2 years. I’m sobbing. I’ve been sobbing all morning. It means I can buy a house or a Condo. I can contribute more to my retirement. I feel like after so much hard work that I will finally be financially stable. I’m 42 and it’ll make me feel like I hit some markers of adulthood.”

Of course, this is America in 2022, a nation where “civil war” trends on Twitter nearly every other day, and so there was an equal and opposite reaction from conservatives. They cast Biden’s announcement as an outrageously unfair taxpayer-funded giveaway to overeducated elites who vote Democratic, and a slap in the face both to people who got degrees and didn’t take out loans or promptly repaid them, as well as the 63% of Americans without a four-year degree.

That reaction is very much of a piece with the new zeitgeist on the political right, to abandon their 1990s vision of more conservative voices on campus to now argue that college is to be completely avoided — a “scam” in the words of far-right youth provocateur Charlie Kirk. Wednesday’s divergent opinions showed how college has become the fault line of modern American politics — but it never had to be this way.

In my view, the road to forbearance that Biden and the federal government started down is a moral imperative — a make-good to the generations who lived through an era when political backlash, greed, and bad decisions by the supposed grown-ups put the 21st-century necessity of education on their backs, when it was our responsibility to provide it.

In After the Ivory Tower Falls, which was published earlier this month, I explain how this drama has played out. In Act One, the success of 1944′s GI Bill — showing how higher ed could benefit the vast middle class — and an upwardly mobile postwar society made college the new American Dream. Enrollment increased sixfold while the notion of a public good kept tuition remarkably low, or even free.

In Act Two, the political backlash against 1960s campus protest, fiscal retrenchment, and a marketing model that pitched prestige to elites over value for the middle class brought a grim reversal of fortune — giving rise to both the student-loan industrial complex as well as the rising political resentment of working classes increasingly shut out and alienated. The hope that was once associated with higher education — of doing better than the generation that came before you — was replaced by fear of clinging to the greased ladder of a shrinking middle class.

Act Three launches now — and the outcome is very much in the air. Can America undo the damage caused by 40-plus years of privatized college, and make higher education the public good it always should have been? If Biden’s debt relief plan proves to be just a one-and-done announcement, it will be remembered as a failure.

Two things need to happen. First, Democrats who’ve seen their political fortunes rise over the course of 2022 must promise to make real higher-ed reform a front-burner issue in the next Congress — with the goal of making community colleges, public universities, and trade schools free or nearly free. That would require some radical steps — like perhaps the wealth tax that Warren has proposed — but America’s big-time problems need some big-time solutions. Those free trade schools — along with apprenticeships or civilian national service — are central to the second big idea, to give opportunity to the millions of young Americans who do not go to college.

Ultimately, it’s about a dream. That’s the real significance of what happened at the White House this week — a turning around of this political battleship back toward the once-nearly-forgotten idea that education can again be a source of hope, and even joy, for our young people, and not a fear-laden millstone around their necks. For the activists who planted this seed, it was a day for thinking big thoughts.

“That’s why we intend to keep fighting until all student debt is canceled and college is free,” Taylor tweeted Wednesday. “If Biden can cancel this much debt, he can cancel it all. And one day, a president will. And yes, we are coming for medical debt, rent, and carceral debt, too.”

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