The pause on federal student loans, which the White House says “has saved 41 million borrowers tens of billions of dollars,” is set to lift on May 1 (after another extension) after last-ditch efforts to extend it from the Jan. 31 deadline. Advocates don’t just want another extension; they want President Joe Biden to cancel the loans entirely.
It doesn’t look like Biden is budging, even though—as Melissa Byrne, founder of Project Springboard and former Bernie Sanders campaign staffer, tells Molly Jong-Fast on this bonus episode of The New Abnormal—it would be easy for him to get rid of them. So why won’t he?
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Sen. Chuck Schumer is on board (maybe to pass the buck to Biden, but on board nonetheless) as are Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Jim Clyburn to name a few. Byrne has a theory about why Biden won’t join them:
“He got to Congress in the late ’60s, early ’70s, when the idea was that if you were rich, you had a right to college, and that we had to punish people for going to college. And that’s how the whole student debt thing started to explode,” she says. “He is part of [the generation that] what they saw as being normal is that you had to earn your place in American society.”
Byrne also addresses why Pell Grants need to be revamped and what’s wrong with the “fairness” argument.
“If you got sick before there was a vaccine, that doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be a vaccine to prevent the next person from getting sick. Change happens when change happens and people like me and others are fighting really hard to make change happen as fast as possible,” she says.
Byrne tells a story about a mom who, because of the pause on student loans, quit her second job as a bartender and focused on her day job as a teacher.
“We don’t need to tell people that if you’re born wealthy, your parents get a tax break, then save for your college. And if you’re born poor, you get a 6 percent or higher loan to be able to pay for your college. I mean, that doesn’t seem right,” says Byrne. “Why do we have this system where your parents’ wealth decides how much of your income you get to keep when you have a job and you’re doing the work?”
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