MinnPost - Headlining with a question - "What’s been lost in the fight between Ilhan Omar (and other progressives) and the Biden administration on student loan forgiveness"
Short answer: Student loan forgiveness is what's been lost. Somehow, Biden presides, w/o any attention to that campaigning issue. Surprised?
An excerpt:
As of this year, one in four Americans — nearly 45 million people — have student debt, and U.S. college students and graduates collectively hold over $1.7 trillion in student loan debt. In Minnesota, 900,000 people carry student loan debt, owing an average of $31,250 in federal and private student debt.
With these numbers, it’s no surprise
that canceling student debt has become a calling card for Democrats;
during his 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden promised to cancel $10,000 in student debt per borrower once he became president.
That hasn’t happened, though Biden
did extend a moratorium on student loan payments during the COVID-19
pandemic, forgave billions of dollars in federal student loans and
committed to improving public service loan forgiveness programs. Beyond
that, Biden has said that he thinks Congress, not the president, has the
power to totally cancel student debt.
Glide and Slide - the old DC way of selective memory, and selective views of who can do what (presuming there is sufficient will to try). MinnPost subheadlined its item:
Even if Biden did what progressives are
calling for, experts say it would do little to change the larger
structural issues with post-secondary education in the U.S.
What structural issues? First, in the Crabgrass queue, the answer is not to keep young people off the labor market four years longer (two years for community college) by letting a subsidized program degenerate into four more years of high school, come one, come all. It could. Then a four year degree would mean little, unlike it being a sign of academic chops, today, from most universities (indeed, even now, we could discount "remote learning" PhD degrees from dubious outlets - hello Marcus B. - where things can slip to paying, writing a dissertation likely to go unread by any scholar, with the thing accredited, somehow, by some body which some State government (Ohio?) grants slack to, politics always having its answers). But digressions aside, MinnPost's item, again:
Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District
Rep. Ilhan Omar [...] .joined several other
progressive lawmakers in sending a letter
to President Biden and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona urging the
administration to release a memo assessing whether it has the authority
to cancel student debt through executive or administrative action.
“We know that there are 45 million
Americans that are shackled with student loan debt, and the average
amount of debt is more than $30,000,” Omar said. “I truly believe that
it’s important for us to cancel student debt in its totality, because
it’s going to help give Minnesota families and, you know, families
across this country the opportunity to pursue their dreams of
homeownership or opening a business and starting their lives.”
In
April, the White House promised it would release the memo in a matter
of weeks. But six months have passed since then. And though the
progressive lawmakers have yet to hear back from Biden (their deadline
for a response was last Friday), Cardona said on Tuesday that examining loan forgiveness is a “priority” for Biden.
Right up there with getting regular monthly pedicures might be an equal Biden priority. Or assuring everyone says "Dr. Jill" is one of Joe's priorities.
How f***ing prior is a priority, one might ask, the answer being "One of degree, not kind."
Excerpting further:
In their letter to Biden and Cardona,
Omar and the other progressives wrote that federal student debt could
be canceled with the “flick of your pen.”
To lawmakers like Omar, the issue of
student debt is not just economic. “If you look at Minnesota, we know
that while thousands of people have been struggling economically, the
disparities within the people of color and Indigenous folks is a dire
situation,” Omar said.
According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics,
Black and African American college graduates owe an average of $25,000
more in student loan debt than white college graduates. Four years after graduation,
48 percent of Black students owe an average of 12.5 percent more than
they borrowed and 29 percent face monthly student loan payments of $350
or more.
Dr. Dominique Baker, assistant
professor of education policy at Southern Methodist University, said
that divide comes from the racial discrimination that has been baked
into American life for hundreds of years.
“For centuries, we created policies
in our country that brought us to this point where Black individuals
tend to rely more on student loans,” Baker said. “And at that same time,
once they’ve taken out the loan, they face a discriminatory labor
market, and our discriminatory society is such that they struggle more
with being able to make their payments.”
[...] Baker also pointed out that a common
misconception surrounding student debt is that it only affects younger
people. While [...] older adults are also taking out significant Parent Plus loans, which
are federal student loans available to the parents of dependent undergrads.
“A lot of parent borrowers and about
15 percent of my clients are over the age of 55, and most of them will
have Parent Plus loans, and they are not able to retire because of the
amount of debt they have,” said Jan Miller, president of Miller Student
Loan Consulting.
[...]
So, without making a college degree as inconsequential as a high school degree now is, what you gonna do? Call ghost busters? Cheapening a university degree already exists, with too easy accreditation for suspect programs happening today. Having more of the same is nobody's answer to nothing. "Bethel University" simply fails to ring the bell the way Stanford, MIT, Yale or even Howard, Case-Western Reserve, or Carelton College rings the bell of actual academic credibility and gravitas. It ain't the big leagues. Never will be. Ditto, "Liberty University." Four years and a piece of paper might open doors, depending on who issued the paper page you end up holding. It can be in Latin, or English, or in another language, but the question has to always be which institution issued it and how high are standard there (And yes, Jarad Kushner holds a Harvard BA degree like his brother's, dad apparently getting a two-for for twenty five million into the school's endowment fund). The beat goes on.
________UPDATE_______
Joe Manchin has a degree. Mark Zuckerberg does not. Proving you can be an asshole, degree or not. Per NYT -
