D’Aungilique Jackson, of Fresno, California, holds a “Cancel Student Debt” sign in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., after the nation’s high court struck down the debt relief program student of President Joe Biden, Friday June 30, 2023.
Kent Nishimura | Los Angeles Times | Getty Images
It took Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin about 30 years to pay off his $100,000 student loan balance. He told CNBC that he questions why other borrowers should simply forgive their debt and that he has fought against President Joe Biden’s efforts to cancel the loans.
The topic of student loan forgiveness stirs passionate feelings about fairness, personal responsibility and economic soundness. The Biden administration’s most recent student loan forgiveness proposal garnered a record number of public comments, with more than 148,000 people sharing their opinion.
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When Marlon Fox, a chiropractor in North Charleston, South Carolina, got his $119,500 in student debt canceled last year, he didn’t tell many people his story. He lives in a predominantly Republican region where there is deep skepticism about debt cancellation for those who have benefited from higher education.
“They say, ‘Hey, you paid off your school loans? That’s unfair,'” Fox told CNBC last year.
Why is the subject of student loan forgiveness so sensitive? CNBC asked a number of different experts for their opinions.
’A question of common sense fairness’
“There is a common-sense fairness issue when it comes to wiping out student debt,” Griffin wrote in an email to CNBC. He served as lieutenant governor of Arkansas before being sworn in as attorney general in 2023.
“It’s not that the debt isn’t being paid, it’s that it’s being paid using existing resources, which come from taxpayers,” Griffin said. This spring, he and attorneys general from six other states filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration’s new reimbursement plan, known as the Saving on a Valuable Education, or SAVE, plan, which helps speed up debt cancellation.
“How is it fair for someone like me, who has paid off my student loans, or for someone who never went to college and therefore has no student debt, that the money of our taxes covers other people’s personal debts?
“A story of personal responsibility”
To understand our current attitude toward debt, we need to go back in time, said Kate Padgett Walsh, a philosophy professor at Iowa State University who studies the ethics of borrowing.
“Long before the invention of money, human beings were indebted to each other in families and small communities,” she said. “Children are indebted to parents for care, family and friends also become indebted to each other when we help each other. Paying off these debts is part of how we all live together and build communities. Debts are a fundamental characteristic of human life with one another.”
“A person who enjoys the benefits of family, friends and community without contributing his or her fair share fails to be a responsible member of the group,” she added.
But the reason so many people now feel that defaulting on debt is irresponsible is because they have been “inundated with this message” from entities that profit from them, Padgett Walsh said.
“Lenders and businesses – especially now, given that so much of our consumption is supported by debt – take advantage of people taking on debt and feeling obligated to pay it back,” she said. “So they encourage us to take on as much debt as we can bear, then insist that it would be morally wrong not to pay it back.”
“We embrace this message in part because it resonates with our fundamental sense of obligation to repay debts to family, friends and community that existed before the invention of money,” Padgett Walsh said. .
“But it can blind us to some of the real damage caused by real forms of financial debt,” she said. “Our priorities should be preventing and alleviating student debt, rather than emphasizing a narrative of personal responsibility.”
“Different relationships with the education system”
“One of the reasons loan forgiveness is such a partisan issue is that members of each party have different relationships with the education system,” said Devin Singh, associate professor of religion at Dartmouth College and author of forthcoming book “Sacred Debt”.
“Statistically, a higher percentage of Democratic voters have earned a four-year college degree and attended graduate school, so student loan forgiveness may directly affect more Democrats than Republicans.”
“The fact that most Americans don’t have a college degree may also mean that many of them resist having their loans canceled because student debt is not their problem and cancellation doesn’t seem therefore not benefit them directly,” said Singh, whose work has included explorations of the intersection of religion with politics and with economics.
Different parties also have different ideas about the role of higher education, he added.
“Democrats can express their views on how education contributes to the public good and supports an engaged citizenry. Some who oppose student loan forgiveness view education as a private good that benefits to the person who buys it.”
“A generational gap”
“I think there are a lot of misconceptions about fairness as well,” said Charlie Eaton, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Merced.
“A lot of people have a hard time putting themselves in the shoes of a student loan borrower if they haven’t been one,” he said. “There is a generation gap. Many older Americans did not have to borrow to go to college.”
“A lot of people also don’t understand that many student loan borrowers who haven’t been able to repay their debts have made payments,” Eaton said. “It’s not that they don’t repay their debts, but that the interest on the debt is so high that even when they make payments, the amount of debt continues to increase.”
Fox, the chiropractor who got his debt forgiven last year, had been paying off student debt since 1988.
Over those years, he paid about $200,000. He had initially borrowed almost $60,000.