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United States Education

Biden is Canceling Up To $10K in Student Loans, $20K For Pell Grant Recipients (npr.org) 441

President Biden has announced a sweeping effort to forgive up to $20,000 of federal student loan debt for Pell Grant recipients, and up to $10,000 for other qualifying borrowers. Biden also extended the federal student loan payment pause through Dec. 31. From a report: "In keeping with my campaign promise, my Administration is announcing a plan to give working and middle class families breathing room as they prepare to resume federal student loan payments in January 2023," Biden said in a tweet on Wednesday. U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a statement, "Today, we're delivering targeted relief that will help ensure borrowers are not placed in a worse position financially because of the pandemic, and restore trust in a system that should be creating opportunity, not a debt trap." To qualify for the $10,000 forgiveness, individual borrowers must earn less than $125,000 a year, or less than $250,000 a year for couples. To qualify for the $20,000 forgiveness, borrowers must meet those income requirements and must have received a Pell Grant in college. Pell Grants are designed to help low-income students pay for higher education.
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Biden is Canceling Up To $10K in Student Loans, $20K For Pell Grant Recipients

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  • Canceling (Score:3, Insightful)

    by systemd-anonymousd ( 6652324 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @02:05PM (#62818679)

    Canceling as in taking other people's money to pay for it? That seems extremely unfair to everyone who scrimped and saved to cover their loans.

    • Re:Canceling (Score:4, Insightful)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @02:07PM (#62818699) Journal

      Its exactly that.

      Some of it is going to people who got swindled by the for profit hi-edu hucksters; but mostly this is taking tax money from people who paid for school themselves, paid down their loans or choose not to go to school for cost or other reasons and giving it to people spent money they did not have, and education products that have been poor in terms of ROI.

      • Re:Canceling (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Joce640k ( 829181 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @02:46PM (#62818943) Homepage

        Yep.

        If they're going to do something they should give $20,000 to everybody who studied during the "let's ripoff the students!" period.

        Those who worked? A $20,000 pat on the back, I'm sure most of them will use it well and productively.

        Those who didn't work? They can pay off some part of their debt.

        Nah, fuck it. Let's just give it to those who worked...

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Train0987 ( 1059246 )

          They could've just passed a law making student debt dischargeable in bankruptcy and solved a whole bunch of these problems at the same time without screwing over responsible people.

      • by larryjoe ( 135075 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @03:19PM (#62819141)

        Yes, it might be morally applaudable to reward those that worked hard and made the challenging financial sacrifices. However, not bailing out those hamstrung by onerous student loans is cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. Maybe (arguably) some of those in loan trouble don't deserve to be bailed out. However, keeping those people under loan distress means that millions of potential consumers are economically sidelined, leading to macro-economic burdens that hurt everyone, including those not in loan distress. In fact, those that worked hard to struggle through college without onerous loans but still haven't hit income pay dirt will be the ones most disadvantaged by the depressed macro-economics.

        • That's a nice spin, but it was clear from the beginning that Biden was using debt-forgiveness as a way of bribing a very large demographic into voting for him. Now he is just paying out the promised bribe (using our money, of course).

          We have a broken education system that is ushering students into crippling debt in return for unmarketable degrees. Dumping taxpayer money into that debt doesn't solve the problem, it pours fuel on the fire, as the academic administrators are now being even more rewarded for

          • If anyone should be funding this, its the colleges who have been happily steering students towards popular degrees where the market is already fully saturated, selling them on completely unrealistic expectations about their employability prospects.

            Nope, the burden of payment should rest on the shoulders of those responsible for handing out the never-ending flow of free money in the first place: The government and their lenders.

            Those colleges and universities didn't print the free money themselves. Nor would they get to constantly raise the price of their services in a normal market. They had to have and continue to receive help to achieve both. That help came from the lenders losing all responsibility for the risk of default through the government

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
      I agree, we should never improve things, because it means future people will have better lives than our own.
      • Re:Canceling (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Junta ( 36770 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @02:23PM (#62818797)

        My problem is this in isolation isn't improving things, it's a one time patch benefiting people who have recently gone through this, but does nothing for those now starting college, for example.

        Cancelling debt should have come *after* some plan to mitigate ongoing financial failings in the current system. As it stands it's just a one-off gift to people to get near-future votes.

        The thing is, they want to talk about cancelling student debt as a one off because that's "cheap" to do, but they don't dare talk about "but what about moving forward?"

        • Re:Canceling (Score:5, Informative)

          by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @02:42PM (#62818919)
          It sounds like they are doing a little to lower the costs (instead of just re-distributing them or actually subsidizing increases) although it's pretty weak:

          The agency has re-established the enforcement unit in the Office of Federal Student Aid and it is holding accreditors' feet to the fire. In fact, the Department just withdrew authorization for the accreditor that oversaw schools responsible for some of the worst for-profit scandals. The agency will also propose a rule to hold career programs accountable for leaving their graduates with mountains of debt they cannot repay, a rule the previous Administration repealed.

          Building off of these efforts, the Department of Education is announcing new actions to hold accountable colleges that have contributed to the student debt crisis. These include publishing an annual watch list of the programs with the worst debt levels in the country, so that students registering for the next academic year can steer clear of programs with poor outcomes. They also include requesting institutional improvement plans from the worst actors that outline how the colleges with the most concerning debt outcomes intend to bring down debt levels.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Joce640k ( 829181 )

          My problem is this in isolation isn't improving things, it's a one time patch benefiting people who have recently gone through this

          ...and not the ones who went through it responsibly.

          This mostly rewards the ones who chose a worthless degree and spent the whole time playing beer pong.

          • My problem is this in isolation isn't improving things, it's a one time patch benefiting people who have recently gone through this

            ...and not the ones who went through it responsibly.

            This mostly rewards the ones who chose a worthless degree and spent the whole time playing beer pong.

            I see this argument thrown around a lot, but is there any real truth to it? What's the cut-off year for "having to bust your ass to stay in class" to "can just sit around doing fuck-all and still get credit?" I've known some people that went to college in the seventies that were worthless sacks of crap too. That doesn't mean everybody going to college from 1970 onward is a worthless sack of crap.

            • What's the cut-off year for "having to bust your ass to stay in class" to "can just sit around doing fuck-all and still get credit?" I've known some people that went to college in the seventies that were worthless sacks of crap to

              It's not about a year. If someone wants to be a worthless sack of crap, it's a free country. I applaud them. It only becomes a problem when people ask us to pay for it.

            • Re:Canceling (Score:4, Insightful)

              by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Thursday August 25, 2022 @04:05AM (#62821245) Homepage Journal

              No, it's horse shit. It's the same bullshit as saying that the minimum wage can be low because it's for kids jobs... when 28% of minimum wage owners are parents.

              Most of the people who have student loan debt are poor. Many people who have jobs will go to their graves still owing student loan debt. Is this the country we want to live in?

          • Enjoy (Score:5, Funny)

            by Bruce66423 ( 1678196 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @03:34PM (#62819203)

            Hard-Working Plumber Looking Forward To Paying For His Neighbor’s Gender Studies Degree

            https://babylonbee.com/news/ha... [babylonbee.com]

    • Re:Canceling (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DesScorp ( 410532 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @02:13PM (#62818733) Journal

      Canceling as in taking other people's money to pay for it? That seems extremely unfair to everyone who scrimped and saved to cover their loans.

      As someone else put it, "We're taking money from plumbers and bricklayers to pay the college loans of lawyers and office managers".

      • debt.
        i am in the trades.
        so how in hell am i paying for it

        • Re:Canceling (Score:4, Informative)

          by Coren22 ( 1625475 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @02:53PM (#62818993) Journal

          The money you contribute to the IRS, plus the money you lose to the inflation this will cause pays for it.

        • Re:Canceling (Score:4, Informative)

          by DrMrLordX ( 559371 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @02:56PM (#62819005)

          You already paid for it. The Feds took on debt themselves to finance student loan money. If the student loans get paid back, the Feds can use the payments to service and retire part of their own debt, likely at a net profit (since the Feds can always borrow money more-cheaply than students). So you paid for it in inflation and/or taxes in the past. The payback would alleviate your future taxes and would do a little to reduce inflation.

          Now you are not receiving the expected relief, since some of that money isn't being paid back to the Feds. Now the Feds have to engage in more borrowing to cover the debt they took on to finance someone else's education.

      • To some degree yes although it would have to be lawyers making less than $125K / year to qualify.

        Although the cutoff is double ($250K total) for a married couple which means a $180K lawyer married to a $60K teacher will still get the benefit.

      • Balanced View (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @03:01PM (#62819051) Journal

        As someone else put it, "We're taking money from plumbers and bricklayers to pay the college loans of lawyers and office managers".

        True, but you are also taking more money from investment bankers, executives and CEOs to pay the student loans of nurses, paramedics and teachers....and given the much lower salaries compared to lawyers and office managers there are probably a lot more teachers, paramedics and nurses being helped by this than there are lawyers.

        The ones I think got treated unfairly and the nurses and teachers who scrimped and saved to repay their loans and now are getting nothing. Overall through, the system they used to have in the UK where university tuition was free and paid for through taxes was a lot fairer. That way anyone with ability could go to university and those who ended up in high-paying jobs paid more through taxes to cover tuition than those who needed a degree for jobs like teaching and nursing that paid much less.

        • Re:Balanced View (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Trailer Trash ( 60756 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @05:01PM (#62819583) Homepage

          I have no idea why this is some well-guarded secret, but we have the same system here in Tennessee. We have free community college as long as you keep your grades up. While it doesn't cover all career options nursing is definitely an option, and maybe teaching. We have free college - but nobody seems to care because they want to go to a big school with a sports team and fraternities and all that. But that's not what "free college" ever was in Europe. Bluntly stated, people want the American experience at the European price.

      • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @03:04PM (#62819069)
        we take it from their boss, who bought out the plumbing and bricklaying companies in a leveraged buyout and never laid a bit of pipe or brick in their lives.

        Meanwhile when that plumber or bricklayer needs a heart bypass or back surgery they can see a doctor and their kids have teachers and their cell phones work because we have engineers.
      • to pay the college loans of lawyers and office managers".

        Lawyers and office managers will not be covered by the loans scheme. More like it will pay down people who got stupid unemployable degrees.

    • Re:Canceling (Score:5, Insightful)

      by CrimsonAvenger ( 580665 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @02:21PM (#62818783)
      Hey, give him a break here! Buying votes is harder than it used to be....
      • by mkwan ( 2589113 )

        It buys around 30 million voters (who probably would have voted Democratic anyway, being young college graduates), and pisses off 200+ million voters who have to pay for it.

    • by Bruce66423 ( 1678196 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @02:26PM (#62818821)

      Hard-Working Plumber Looking Forward To Paying For His Neighbor’s Gender Studies Degree

      https://babylonbee.com/news/ha... [babylonbee.com]

    • Re:Canceling (Score:5, Insightful)

      by JourneymanMereel ( 191114 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @02:27PM (#62818829) Homepage Journal

      Indeed. It looks like we just made a 300 billion dollar campaign contribution to the Democratic party. Not even counting the (almost impossible to calculate) inflationary impact.

      • In a democracy that's kind of a bug and kind of a feature, people are expected to vote in their self-interest and the end result should be an approximation of the most good for the most people.

        Biden did campaign on forgiving $10K of student debt, so at least the electorate knew it going in.

    • It is unfair, but life is unfair and balancing the unfair is the challenge.

      With student loans a racket developed and got out of hand over the past quarter century. For much of the later 20thcentury ITT Tech was leader in student loan fraud then the university of phoenix got in the game. Both got fined millions over the past 20 years for fraud, ITT is gone while UofPx is still destroying lives by convincing gullible students to take massive loans.

      Forgiving debt, stealing others money, is unsustainable .

    • Nope, they are just opening up the spreadsheet and subtracting the numbers. This is money owed the federal government. Lowering inflation via debt service of student loans doesn't sound like a good idea to me because IMO the people who benefit from government programs should be the ones who pay for it. Who should pay to keep inflation low? Not people in their 20s and 30s who qualified for pell grants, that's for sure.

      Full disclosure: I worked a full-time job while going to college to pay for it, and I

    • The problem is that you have to break the chain somewhere.
      And no matter how it happens, it is always going to hurt.
      Might as well do it sooner rather than later.
      Gentle healers leave stinking wounds.
    • Re:Canceling (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Tailhook ( 98486 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @02:53PM (#62818989)

      That seems extremely unfair

      Doesn't matter. It's vote buying season and the calculus is that this will render more votes for (D)s for the gimmes than votes against (D)s by principled people.

      • Republicans bought votes with the PPP. The difference is, it went mostly to already wealthy business owners.
    • Re:Canceling (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @02:56PM (#62819003)

      The worse part is that it does nothing going forward to work on lowering the cost for future college attendees. It's a really expensive band-aid that's going to piss off those not eligible, and ultimately piss off a whole new generation when they aren't able to partake in a few years.

      Pretty much everything politicians do. Technically, he's addressing a campaign promise, but he's doing it in the dumbest and least ultimately effective way.

    • Not only that. It does absolutely nothing to even attempt to fix the underlying structural problems that got us here in the first place. This is putting a band-aid on a foot that's rotting off.
  • by saloomy ( 2817221 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @02:06PM (#62818689)
    This is how we get more inflation. Just tell everyone their bills dont matter
    • elementary economics.
      prices go up when there is less supply.
      also when the supply is controlled.
      fossil fuels are a controlled supply

  • by weeboo0104 ( 644849 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @02:15PM (#62818739) Journal

    You can't tell me that it was less costly to finance and forgive all that debt rather than force lenders that gave loans at predatory rates to refinance them at the current prime rate.

    If a person spent 4 years at an institute of higher learning and can't figure out how to use the knowledge they gained to pay a loan back, forgiving their current debt is only going to prolong the inevitable of when they take another loan with no idea how to pay it back.

    • by PCM2 ( 4486 )

      You can't tell me that it was less costly to finance and forgive all that debt rather than force lenders that gave loans at predatory rates to refinance them at the current prime rate.

      But the latter would have very little effect. More than 90% of all student loans come from the federal government, not "predatory lenders" (aka private lenders).

    • ok.
      so if making debt reduction works for the top 1 percent.
      why does it not work for the other 99 percent

  • by enriquevagu ( 1026480 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @02:17PM (#62818751)

    I guess that University administrators will notices that their prospective customers get free money to enjoy their services and adapt their prices accordingly.

  • right now our best consumers are loaded down with so much debt they're not spending. The housing crisis isn't helping matters. They're also not having children, again because of all the debt.

    Economies need consumers. The baby boomers have been making up the shortfall with their spending (having done very well over the years and having benefited from heavily subsidized colleges and tuition savings passed onto them from those subsidies). But they're about 10 years away from aging out (or outliving their r
    • The only way out of this is to forgive student loan debt

      I would say that's pretty damn unfair to every person in the U.S. who didn't attend college.

      It strikes me as odd for you to say that the way out of a bad economy, is to add 900 *billion* (yes that is the estimate) of costs onto the backs of primarily people who didn't go...

      Luckily it will be easy to find that money with 87000 new IRS agents who can squeeze the poor for even more money.

      • first, debt forgiveness is just the 1st step intended to address an immediate crisis. The goal is to restore the state and federal subsidies that kept tuition low when the boomers and older Gen X were in college. I don't see anyone demanding the boomers pay back those subsidies, and restoring them gives you the opportunity to go back to college.

        Also, you directly benefit from a well educated population whether you have a degree or not. College grads are many times more productive. How do we raise wages
      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        "I would say that's pretty damn unfair to every person in the U.S. who didn't attend college." This sounds a lot like "Well I didn't get to get any benefit of this so eff you!" I only got an AA back in the early 2000's so I won't get any benefit of this, but you can't argue that the cost of going to higher education has not gotten extremely expensive over the past 20 years and much of it from predatory for-profit schools. I would have said that this would needed to be paired with a similarly sized vouche
    • by JourneymanMereel ( 191114 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @02:39PM (#62818909) Homepage Journal

      So the crux of your argument seems to be that college is important and everybody should go.

      But this action does NOTHING to help with that. It rewards people who made poor financial choices in the past... which will just encourage them to do it again. And yes, borrowing money to pay for an overpriced university is a poor financial choice. And, of course, with "money" flowing freely while everybody just decided they could deal with the problem later, the universities just kept increasing their prices.

      As someone said above, taking money from plumbers and bricklayers to pay the college loans of lawyers and office managers is horrible idea.

    • The only way out of this is to forgive student loan debt and restore the subsidies the boomers (and older Gen X) enjoyed.

      It's entirely possible to address this in ways that aren't as drastic.

      If I were president, my means of doing so would be this:
      1.) For the duration of this term, the burden will be paused. You can pay them or not, they won't default, they won't go to collections, and the absence of payment won't adversely affect your credit score.

      2.) For that same time, they will be interest free. Any payment will be 100% a principal payment.

      3.) For the next four tax years, federal income tax returns can be earmarked for loa

  • by rapierian ( 608068 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @02:18PM (#62818757)
  • Suckers... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Tulsa_Time ( 2430696 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @02:22PM (#62818789)

    Everyone that saved and worked their way through college or took out a Home Equity loan is just a big sucker... paying off other peoples loans...

  • by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @02:27PM (#62818833)

    I didn't finish college, in part due to the cost. This is a slap in the face to those that were fiscally responsible. Now I get to help pay for someone with poor math skills.

  • by Nocturrne ( 912399 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @02:32PM (#62818871)

    Taking money from people who work and giving it to people who don't work, but vote majority democrat - fucking great. What about people like me who worked full time and went to school, paying off all debts? I didn't work my ass off and pay taxes so a bunch of sniveling twatty brats can live with their parents until they are 45, getting government handouts.

    • You don't matter. You are probably a deplorable.
    • "I didn't get to benefit from this so you shouldn't either" is a pretty shitty stance when higher education costs are a problem. It needs to be fixed somehow. Is this the best solution? Probably not, but it's one that the executive branch can authorize without much issue.
      • Those higher education costs are because everyone was getting their education on uncle Sam's dime so they didn't care how much it really cost so the result is that colleges raised their prices not because they had to but because it was there for the taking.

        Run on sentence but that is the whole problem. The government gave out large loans and didn't actually regulate how that money was being spent at every level. The educators apparently have no incentive to make good productive students with all that fre
  • Why pay down a loan when you might get it paid off later? Instead take your money and take a vacation, order Uber eats for every meal, and buy the latest $1,500 phone. Fiscal responsibility is not being encouraged. The person who paid their loan down gets screwed. The person who instead of taking a student loan, spent $10,000 on a vehicle to move their landscaping equipment gets screwed. Instead the relief goes to the the people who statistically will earn more over their lifetime - and it gets paid into by
  • Are next years' college entrants just going to jump on the loan bandwagon? Or will this relief program be ongoing? If it's the latter, then what we have done is converted federal student loans into a grant program. And if it's a grant program, let's just bite the bullet and structure it as one. Along with all the administration that making the government the single payer for many peoples' educations.

    Now go and ask educators and college administrations how they will like having to deal with a government bur

  • ...has been wiped out by MORE that $10,000 per student in recent decades. So this debt relief is a minor consolation to the outrageous education costs, partly brought on by lack of government support.
  • by RoccamOccam ( 953524 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @03:16PM (#62819125)
    This seems to be unconstitutional, on the face of it. I would have thought that only congress would have the legitimate power to do this.
  • by mtrip ( 2684377 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @03:22PM (#62819155)
    6-figure income earners are going to have their debt reduced by making the poor pay for it.. In what way is that "liberal"? "Borrowers are eligible for this relief if their individual income is less than $125,000 ($250,000 for married couples)" Your family can be raking in a quarter of a mil a year, and you can request Starbucks/Amazon warehouse/Burger flippers pay for it. This is an outrage.
  • by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @03:48PM (#62819291)

    If tomorrow colleges still charge the same fees then cancelling debt is pointless. This is an activity that should be done *after* addressing the underlying problem.

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