Ron Brownstein: What the Student-Loan Debate Overlooks

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The Atlantic
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Older generations of college students didn’t have as much debt not because they were more individually virtuous but because they benefited from a collective social investment in their education, @RonBrownstein writes:

theatlantic.com
What the Student-Loan Debate Overlooks
President Biden’s loan-forgiveness plan offers younger Americans the same benefits that Boomers have been afforded all along.
10:35 AM · Sep 9, 2022

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/09/biden-student-loan-forgiveness-public-college/671388/

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https://archive.ph/uEe3w

A core conservative critique of President Joe Biden’s executive action on student-debt forgiveness is that the plan requires blue-collar Americans to subsidize privileged children idly contemplating gender studies or critical race theory at fancy private colleges.

That idea, articulated by Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, among others, aims to portray the GOP as the party of working Americans and Democrats as the champions of the smug, well-educated elite. But it fundamentally misrepresents who’s attending college now, where they are enrolled, and the reasons so many young people are graduating with unsustainable debt.

Many factors have contributed to the explosion in student debt, but one dynamic is almost always overlooked: the erosion of the commitment to affordable public higher education as an engine for upward mobility that benefits the entire community.

Contrary to the stereotype conjured by critics, the number of debtors from public colleges today (about 22 million) exceeds the number from private and for-profit colleges combined (about 21 million), according to federal data. One reason so many of those students from public schools are in debt is that they have graduated in an era when states have shifted more of the burden for funding higher education from taxpayers to students—precisely as more of those students are minorities reared in families on the short side of the nation’s enormous racial wealth gap.

*snip*

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