Student Loan Forgiveness

my reaction, my decision

What Happened

This week, the Biden administration launched a student loan forgiveness plan that will take up to $20,000 off the top of student loan balances, and make other changes to how student loans work in our country. $10,000 applies to everyone under an income threshold of $125,000 for a single person or $250,000 for a married couple. $20,000 applies to PELL grant recipients under these limits.

The rationale for the PELL grant provision is that PELL grants are available to low-income people and families—the very people least likely to have generational wealth, least likely to have the cushion/safety net of parents they can call for help in an expensive emergency, and thus least likely to be able to make traction on getting out of debt. While this is definitely true about PELL grant recipients at the time they are getting the PELL grants, there’s no rationale for thinking PELL grant recipients are most likely to stay in that position.

I got a degree in mathematics and went into data science, where I am earning more money than a friend who came from a middle-class family and became a teacher. It makes little sense for my debt to be relieved at a rate twice as much as hers.

The Proposal Has Some Good Points

Everyone is focused on the forgiveness, but some of the other aspects are positive, in my opinion. New provisions will ensure that balances don’t grow and grow and grow, making it impossible for low earners to ever see the light at the end of the tunnel. This is good; there are many people who’ve paid on time for decades and still aren’t out of debt.

Some of the other provisions, like capping income-based repayments at 5% instead of 10%, will be positive in some individual situations, circumstance-dependent.

Comparing this to PPP Shows That It’s Bullshit

The White House spent this week on Twitter calling out opponents by citing the amount of PPP money those people received. This isn’t even apples-and-oranges; it’s apples and batteries (as in, assault and battery). The government forced businesses to stay closed and owes compensation to people who were legally disallowed from earning money. That this is their idea of a “gotcha” argument shows the poverty of this plan.

What Will Happen Next Is Unclear

It seems fairly obvious that this was constitutionally shady, at best. Biden did this under a law about emergency relief spending—a law that in and of itself may not be constitutional, but hasn’t been challenged and declared unconstitutional (yet?). Will the program be instituted in time for people to benefit before courts overturn it? Will courts overturn it if people have already had their debt forgiven? What happens if people partake of this program and then a court finds that Biden overstepped his authority under the law?

If Democrats keep Congress, then a law officially giving him the authority to do this is quite possible. If Congress flips, then the possibility of this happening is zero. If this was meant to motivate young voters, it may work in general (though it won’t work on me).

What happens next?

I do not know the answer to any of these questions.

My Debt

I got through school (a state school) on a combination of PELL Grants, loans, and grants that my school’s financial aid team found for me. My debt load was a lot lower than it could have been, in part because I was able to get a waiver and not live on campus. Most students are required to live on campus for a certain number of semesters, but I was not. My PTSD is triggered by many fewer things than it used to be, but when I started school the sight and smell of drunk people was still a major trauma-related trigger for me. Living on campus would have been a minefield for me, and I was able to live elsewhere. That saved me from debt that I would have otherwise had to take on. As a result, my debt was around $53,000 instead of around $83,000—an enormous blessing. It was hard—renting rooms I found on Craigslist, sometimes in very bad situations; sometimes missing meals; sometimes tutoring in between classes and taking the cash I was paid at the end of the hour directly to the student center to buy a meal. But not having the extra debt is something I’m grateful for—I’m not presently paying off cafeteria meals I ate during October 2017.

How I Could Be Affected

I got PELL Grants all through school, so I would qualify for $20,000 in loan forgiveness under the current terms. The interest freeze that started in March 2020 has been a huge opportunity to get student loan payoff traction, and I’ve taken advantage of it. My balance is around $34,000 now, so $20,000 off the top does most of the rest of the work for me.

The Department of Education has income information for some borrowers, according to their website, and will handle their forgiveness without the need for the borrowers to do anything. Other borrowers will need to apply.

I don’t know what that means. Does it mean that Department of Education has access to income tax records? I don’t know if the Department of Education has my information or not. I had to verify my income each year that I was in school to keep getting my PELL grants. I don’t think I’ve updated it since, but I’ve filled out so much paperwork in the last couple of years that I’m just not sure. Nor am I sure how the government gets its information, or what might happen—the same process that got COVID money sent out might get invoked to have relief applied without borrowers needing to try.

My Decision

If the Department of Education has access to my income (which is under the limit) and I login one day to make a payment only to find my balance has dropped by $20,000, ok. I’m not going to try to find or initiate a process to have my balance restored. I doubt that any such process exists, and I’m not going to play Sisyphus in trying to create it.

If I have to apply to get the $20,000? I’m not going to.

Why?

Because it’s wrong. It feels wrong, and dirty. It’s weaseling out of an obligation I took on with full foresight and understanding. It’s participating in a system that has been set up to buy votes for a President and party I don’t believe in or agree with, and it is going to cause many more problems than it solves.

Higher education is a joke. Some of my debt is related to mandatory diversity courses wherein I had to learn about the goddamn Genderbread Person, general education courses where I learned that Atticus Finch is a white supremacist and nothing much has changed since the days of Jim Crow, and other sorts of errant nonsense.

This forgiveness is going to enable higher education to charge even more, and it’s both morally and practically abhorrent. If the loans are so predatory and awful that forgiving them at taxpayer expense is morally justifiable, then the first and most important step for the US government to take is to stop issuing them. That this isn’t part of the plan shows what this really is: an attempt to motivate young voters to stem the tide of a projected red tsunami in November.

The country is broke and filling out a form asking to have it made moreso on my account—as part of a nakedly political attempt to buy votes—is just not something I’m willing to do.

Yes, I Understand What This Means

No, my foregoing $20,000, when the federal budget is so large that if there were a God, he would need to hire a math tutor to help him understand it, isn’t going to make any difference. It’s barely a drop of water compared to the ocean.

Yes, I understand that some of you have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxes in your lives, and you’d much rather your taxes go to get me out of student debt and into my next goal—home ownership—much sooner.

I get the big picture of my country, and my place in it, and from that perspective this decision could reasonably be called a stupid, prideful, and expensive mistake.

What It Means to Me

I, like most people who are survivors of long-term child abuse, struggle with hating myself. Childhood defines our normal and programs our default settings. Mine were set at hating myself and feeling worthless—a long time ago. I struggle with intense feelings of self-loathing and have worked insanely hard to occasionally have an ounce of self-respect. Filling out a form asking to have my obligations removed at others’ expense, just because I can, is not representative of who I want to be.

I want to have integrity—a word and concept that originates from the Latin word for wholeness, related to the mathematical term integer—and that means being the same person all the time. Filling out a form asking to have my personal responsibility for an obligation—one I am fully capable of meeting—removed and put onto the collective shoulders of the whole country? That’s not who I am. It’s not who I want to be.

Keeping the small, precious amount of self-respect I’ve worked to cultivate is worth more than $20,000 to me.

A lot more.

Housekeeping

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