Should public access to colleges and universities be free? Should all student debt be discharged? Many people believe that forgiving student loans would be bad for the economy because the money used to pay for education could be better spent building hospitals, schools, or roads where needed. Furthermore, if the government had allowed you to borrow money for your education, you would be responsible for paying it back. On the other side, many support student loans since borrowers can utilize their monthly payments for other things, like making purchases at nearby shops, which would boost the local economy. Should the Government Take More Action to Ease the Burden of Student Loans? Josh Mitchell is a writer. Describe the process and reasons behind “President Barack Obama’s 2011 announcement of a student loan forgiveness program.” Are you aware of what President Obama did to help students with their loans? What Donald Trump did with student debt while he was president? Why are individuals in favor of forgiving student loans? Why are many against forgiving student loans? How can people avoid repaying their loans? Student loans are common among many struggling students. Student loan forgiveness seems like a wonderful concept because these loans enable students to pay for school and all of their academic demands.
A student may use student loans to finance their higher education, but at what cost? Students who apply for and receive student loans eventually have to pay them back. They can assist with lodging, board, and many other school-related goods. Student loans are excellent financial resources available to anyone who desires to advance their education. Once the debt is repaid, it may cause some stress to the borrower to be able to do so. Since we cannot all expect to find employment immediately after graduation, some people believe that a scheme for forgiving student loans could help students afford to attend college. With a forgiveness program that gives students peace of mind that they won’t have to pay more fees down the road, more people will want to pursue a better education for their future. Students who have debt tend to be less committed to finishing their education than those who don’t. It is too much tension for a student who is already under a lot of stress to cope. In addition to striving to pass each class and earn good scores, students also have to worry about taking out additional loans if they fail (Group and Kumar, 2022). A kid will be more committed to succeeding academically if no debt is hanging over their head. A student’s ability to pay off debt can prevent them from continuing their education, making them better people. A student also values knowing when they can afford education and when they won’t be able to receive a loan to cover costs. It would be greatly welcomed by the multitudes of individuals who genuinely desire to pursue higher education.
Unpaid student loans will burden our economy. Since those whose debts will be forgiven won’t be making payments, the economy will suffer due to the debt’s stagnation. Most students who receive student loans worry about their bills because most people have expenses, whether they have additional expenses or not (Klein 2022). Because a budget exists for a reason, students who don’t understand that life is full of expenses are unlikely to succeed. Future students who attempt to obtain loans will discover numerous ways to repay them. Some banks will work with the student to establish a plan that works for them in terms of consolidation, monthly payments, and other factors. Our nation will benefit from student loan forgiveness because more people who have obtained an education will find employment, and fewer people will depend on government assistance or live paycheck to paycheck from odd jobs they pick up. Because they won’t be as stressed out by unpaid bills, more people who want to pursue their education but worry they won’t be able to afford the expense later will do so. Yes, students will always have a debt to pay off; after all, who doesn’t in this day and age?
Additionally, students do not need to worry about having a sufficient budget because living within that budget will allow them to survive. Finding a loan involves thinking about various repayment options, but in the end, the cost of the education will still be covered out of pocket. The need for more money to meet their necessities drives most students to attend college. If someone does not assist, the struggling student will continue to struggle. Our county will profit more from loan forgiveness than people struggling to pay back their debts since it serves the larger purpose of educating people. The program will benefit many worldwide who desire to pursue their education but cannot afford it (Klein, 2022). Children are also given the idea that we are a nation that will support one another in the long run. Giving these pupils a vacation and allowing them to concentrate on their studies would also significantly boost their marks. As a result, the student loan forgiveness program will benefit our globe more than harm.
Mitchell’s defense stated that “some opponents have recommended a total restructure of federal aid to colleges and universities, rewarding those schools that can lower spending and penalizing schools that are not” to solve the issue. Regarding regulating college and university tuition, I concur with Mitchell. For instance, the high cost of tuition should be the first issue the government tackles since it forces people to take out larger loans than they would have otherwise. Levels of student loan debt also differ significantly by college. The cost of college is impacted (Molnar, 2022). a number of factors, such as tuition, the cost of living nearby the college, the demographics of the classmates, the accessibility of grants and scholarships, and the proportion of out-of-state students, are taken into consideration (at public colleges). Public colleges often have lower tuition expenses than private non-profit colleges, despite the fact that scholarships and grants offered by private non-profit institutions can frequently greatly reduce the cost of attendance. (Moreover, the government should change how it approves loans. Another illustration: If a student received $10,000 this year ($5,000 for the fall semester and $5000 for the spring semester), they could now claim they will use the entire amount, and the college or university will reimburse them for any money that was not used during the semester, resulting in an unjustified increase in debt. Barack Obama, the last president, made specific improvements to student loan regulations that were extraordinarily cautious and ultimately ineffectual. Yes, they have reduced or, more accurately, maintained sustainable interest rates while also going by Income-based repayment program Students make payments based on their yearly income; however, this is only for a set period before the monthly payments increase. In addition, the proposal stipulates that the borrower will pay the reduced payments for up to three years while the federal government will cover any accrued interest that has not yet been paid.
The plan also includes possibilities for loan cancellations following 20 years of on-time payments and loan forgiveness for borrowers who work in public service (Group and Kumar, 2022). A month before the elections, President Donald Trump made his first comments on college and university education while running for president. He said that to make higher education more accessible, his plan entails first reducing the average student’s obligation to make post-graduation payments because doing so can make it difficult to enter the workforce or start a family. The second component of his idea was to lower the price of education by requiring schools and universities to limit their administrative and financial costs to lower tuition and provide financial help to their students. Politicians lie while running for office because they say one thing during the campaign and a different thing after they are in the position they desire. Trump’s education, for instance, was discussed in a government article. President Joe Biden said when introducing his debt cancellation program: “I campaigned for office to develop the economy from the bottom up and the middle out because when we do that, everyone does better, and everybody does well. The rich are tremendously successful, the impoverished have a path to improvement, and the middle class has some breathing room. The United States will benefit from this as it competes with leading the global economy in the twenty-first century. That is the topic of today’s announcement. It’s all about chance. Giving everyone a fair shot is the goal. It has to do with possibilities, which is the word that best sums up America. It all comes down to opening options (Molnar 2022).
Department Budget May cut Student Loan Forgiveness Program, and “his motivation for doing so is to encourage public schools to adopt a more choice-friendly policy, he said, many times, to lessen the role of government and increase the participation of parents when it comes to choosing their children’s schools,” according to the report. According to the U.S. government, the average federal student loan now costs hundreds of dollars more, increasing the cost of new student debt. According to data from the Treasury Department, a new government loan’s interest rate will increase by 0.69 percentage points starting in July. This can result in an over 20% rise in the cost of borrowing interest for undergraduate students.
Many people support student loan forgiveness because it would allow students to use the money they would use for the loan’s monthly payment to buy goods and boost the economy by spending it in stores. This would also lower the unemployment rate because the stores where customers spend their money would have more money to expand and hire more staff. Take Robert Applebaum, author of “Student Loan Debt Should Be Forgiven to Stimulate the Economy,” as an example. “Forgiving student loan debt would offer a stronger jolt to the economy than any rescue or stimulus packages that the federal government has attempted,” the article claims. (Applebaum, 2011) In my opinion, people should forgive their debt after more than 15 years of on-time payments so they can go about living their lives worry-free. According to a recent estimate from the Government Accountability Office[GAO], an independent organization, only 3% of senior citizen-headed families in the United States currently have federal student debt, primarily debt they took on to pay for their educations. The survey warned senior citizens with defaulted loans would only rise as more baby boomers enter retirement. “Let’s give the market a chance to aid the cause while we’re attempting to ameliorate a lot of the indebted college graduates,” says (Noel, 2016). Making it simpler for students to declare bankruptcy in order to get out of debt would serve as a sobering dose of reality for academic institutions, students, and a government determined to overregulate one more sector. Black students have been disproportionately harmed by student loan debt. Racist injustice might be improved by forgiveness.
Black college students borrow more money than their white counterparts because of things like family income, generational wealth, parental education, and college preferences. This debt is the result of interest rates and graduate student loans. Additionally, Scott-Clayton emphasized that the rate of student loan default for black graduates is 21% higher than for white graduates. Estimates of the cost of student loans also depend on other highly unpredictable assumptions, such as expectations for interest rates, the speed at which students would pay off their debt, and salary growth. The price of the student loan program and other Department programs could change significantly depending on changes in actual interest rates, wage growth rates, and other economic conditions. In order to create official estimates of the cost of federal student loan programs, the Department’s Budget Office maintains a student loan model that depends on these factors. Differences in these fundamental presumptions and presumptions regarding take-up rates are primarily responsible for discrepancies between the Department’s estimations and those of others. Brown and black individuals frequently need to acquire greater education in order to compete with white people who may be able to do so with less schooling for the same pay and positions. Why do they do this? They must accumulate additional debt. Since debt prevents people from accumulating wealth, it has an impact not only on the debtors directly but also on their families and communities.
According to a Roosevelt Institute research released in August 2020, while individual white borrowers at the median stand to earn the most in terms of absolute money from college debt cancellation, “relative gains for Black borrowers are far greater, and the higher percentage of Black borrowers indicates that Black wealth as a whole would expand more as a result,” The significant increase in Black net worth favorably leads to student loan cancellation, which could have profoundly favorable consequences for Black families given the multiple advantages that money brings in the contemporary U.S. setting. More help than just money is provided by student loan debt forgiveness. One approach is to provide support for young business entrepreneurs. With an undergraduate degree, students generally leave college with loans that will take years, if not decades, to repay. The average debt for a high school graduate in 2015 is predicted to be close to $35,000. Someone’s yearly wage is that alone. Regular person can now reduce their debt and potentially qualify for loan forgiveness thanks to initiatives by the federal government. Since the plans are so new, many individuals do not know how they operate or how much they genuinely assist borrowers.
One is no longer required to make loan installments if you are granted loan cancellation, forgiveness, or discharge in full. You are responsible for paying back the remaining loan amount if you are only eligible for partial forgiveness, cancellation, or discharge. In addition to receiving a refund of some or all of your loan payments, depending on the type of loan discharge you are eligible for, you may also have any negative information about your loan default or delinquency removed from your credit report. The discharge might remove the default status if the loan was in default. You could regain federal student aid eligibility if you have no other defaulted debts. By lowering the interest rate on your student loan, refinancing may also ease your financial burden. According to your current rate and the historically low-interest rates now in effect, refinancing may result in significant savings. But if you refinance a federal student loan, you lose access to government advantages, including chances for forgiveness and discharge. You must have strong credit and a stable income to be eligible for refinancing because only private lenders offer it. Before deciding, compare the features and interest rates offered by the best student loan refinancing businesses.
On the other hand, a lot of people are against forgiving student loans since they have already completed their payments and feel that because they did, others need to do the same. Considering that the funds may be used to build hospitals, schools, and roads, some individuals believe that since they were taken from the government, they should be returned. Additionally, others think students should keep paying back their loans because the total debt in our country has already topped $1 trillion. Student loan debt is one of the largest ticking time bombs threatening to explode and cause catastrophic damage to the American economy. Everyone is encouraged to pursue higher education as a way to advance. Private student loan providers like Sallie Mae and its collection agencies, which have no interest in paying off employees of 501(c)(3) non-profits, are an example of a firm or group of people opposed to student loan forgiveness. Thirdly, those who work for a non-profit that is not exempt under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code but offers a public service.
Loan system abuse occurs when student loans are forgiven. For their own financial decisions, people must be held accountable. In a 2020 poll, 46% of Americans said forgiving student loans were unfair to borrowers who had already paid them off, while 39% said it was unfair to borrowers with no debt. According to Noyes, a columnist for Lone Conservative, taking out a loan is a decision that shouldn’t be replaced by government bailouts. He talked about the costs he had to incur to settle his $27,000 in student loan debt. By “cancelling” student loans, lenders punish borrowers like me for honoring my commitment to repay the debt I voluntarily took on (Spinelle, 2022). Noyes says that the core of the case for forgiveness is that “people are entitled to a college degree and other people’s hard work.” Laws have been written to support the idea that adults are not responsible for their behavior (i.e., taking on debt). I, nor anybody else, has a right to a college education in a free society. Furthermore, only 20% of Americans are in debt from school loans. Is it fair to provide relief to those who pushed their financial resources to the limit to attend college and to exclude those who may not have student loan debt but may yet face financial hardship?
According to Molnar (2022), the Biden administration ought to have identified the causes of the high cost of higher education and executed legislation addressing those issues rather than offering loan forgiveness. Any debt that is forgiven should not be done so. It’s unjust to those who have paid off their debt, those who decided against attending college, those who did attend college and now hold well-paying positions, and to future generations who will not have their debts erased. More crucially, it encourages institutions to raise tuition fees, even though many have endowments worth tens of billions of dollars.
Finally, the government should take charge of the approved loan amounts and only use them to cover the cost of the student’s classes and textbooks to assist with student loan debt. It’s also essential for people to be aware of the many strategies available to them for avoiding making the last loan payment. Since the expense of university education has increased and more students have been compelled to take out loans to finance their expenditures, student loan debt has become a significant problem. In the United States, the average student loan debt has increased to over $37,000, and the total amount of outstanding student loan debt is thought to be over $1 trillion. For both people and the economy as a whole, this has resulted in a variety of issues. High student loan debtors frequently struggle to make ends meet since they must pay off their debts while still keeping up with other living expenses. Financial problems and even loan defaults could result from this, which would harm their credit and make it challenging for them to obtain other types of credit. As borrowers fret about how they will ever be able to repay their loans, student loan debt can also cause tension and anxiety. The high level of student loan debt in the United States has numerous macroeconomic effects. For instance, it’s regarded as one of the causes of young people delaying home purchases since they can’t afford to take on more debt. The housing market and the economy as a whole are affected by this. Many graduates are said to choose lower-paying employment because they must make their loan repayments, which is one of the reasons why they have student loan debt. This may impact economic expansion and productivity. The Biden-Harris student debt relief plan will assist millions of Americans in purchasing houses, setting aside money for retirement, or launching small companies by giving them crucial relief as they recover from the pandemic and deal with the all-too-often enormous weight of student loan debt.
Applebaum, Robert, 2011. “Here’s a Demand: Forgive Student Loan Debt | Robert Applebaum.” The Guardian. Retrieved October 15, 2022 (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/oct/03/demand-forgive-student-loan-debt).
Catherine, Sylvain, and Constantine Yannelis. 2020. “The Distributional Effects of Student Loan Forgiveness.” National Bureau of Economic Research. Retrieved (https://www.nber.org/papers/w28175).
Group, Gale, and Lisa Kumar. 2022 “American Law Yearbook 2013: A Guide to the Year’s Major Legal Cases and Developments – Highland Park Public Library.” Link.hplibrary.org. Retrieved October 15, 2022 (https://link.hplibrary.org/portal/American-law-yearbook-2013–a-guide-to-the/OA82exbC6nU/).
Klein, Betsy. 2022. “Student Loan Forgiveness Applications Now Open through Beta Mode Website, Biden Administration Says | CNN Politics.” CNN. Retrieved October 15, 2022 (https://edition.cnn.com/2022/10/14/politics/student-loan-forgiveness-beta-site/index.html).
Molnar, P. 2022. “Should Biden Have Forgiven More Student Loan Debt?” San Diego Union-Tribune. Retrieved (https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/story/2022-09-02/should-biden-have-forgiven-more-student-loan-debt).
Noel Merino, 2016 “Student Loans Paperback | Barnes & Noble®.” Www.barnesandnoble.com. Retrieved October 15, 2022 (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/mobile/w/student-loans-noel-merino/1125829075?ean=9780737774115).
Spinelle Jenna 2022. “Take Note: Josh Mitchell on How the History of Student Loan Programs Led to the Current Student Debt Crisis.” WPSU. Retrieved October 15, 2022 (https://radio.wpsu.org/2022-07-08/take-note-josh-mitchell-on-how-the-history-of-student-loan-programs-led-to-the-current-student-debt-crisis).