[President Biden’s loan-forgiveness plan offers younger
Americans the same benefits that Boomers have been afforded all
along.]
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WHAT THE STUDENT-LOAN DEBATE OVERLOOKS  
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Ronald Brownstein
September 9, 2022
The Atlantic
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_ President Biden’s loan-forgiveness plan offers younger Americans
the same benefits that Boomers have been afforded all along. _

, Erik Carter / The Atlantic; Getty

 

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
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Rubio
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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
[[link removed]]. 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
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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.

Biden’s plan, despite its imperfections, recognizes that this
massive cost shift is crushing too many young people as they enter
adulthood. It is also a belated reaffirmation that society benefits
from helping more young people obtain degrees that will allow them to
reach the middle class.

Public colleges and universities are the principal arena in which the
debt and affordability crisis will be won or lost because—again,
contrary to popular perception—the majority of postsecondary
students (about four in five) attend public, not private,
institutions
[[link removed]].

When Baby Boomers were in college, few seemed to question whether
society benefited from helping more young people earn their diploma at
an affordable price. States provided public colleges enough taxpayer
dollars to keep tuition to a minimum. In the 1963–64 academic year,
around the time the first Boomers stepped onto campuses, the average
annual tuition for four-year public colleges was $243, according to
federal statistics
[[link removed]].
Tuition at those public schools was still only about $500 to $600 a
year by the time most of the last Baby Boomers had started college, in
the mid-1970s. (Adjusting for inflation, prices grew at a modest rate
while Boomers matriculated, rising only from about $2,100 in constant
2021 dollars when the first ones started to about $2,600 when the last
ones did.) The renowned University of California and City University
of New York systems didn’t even charge _any _tuition until the
mid-’70s.

Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California,
told me that the generous mid-century funding for public higher
education drew on the legacy of the GI Bill after World War II and the
post-Sputnik investments in education and research, each of which had
broad political support. “The attitude was ‘We should invest in
young people,’” he said. “It was just an ethic.” Also
important, he noted: “The young people they were thinking about were
young white kids primarily.”

But for racially diverse Millennials and Generation Z students, the
experience has been quite different. By 1999, the year the first
Millennials entered campuses, the average annual cost for a four-year
public college or university, measured in inflation-adjusted
dollars, had doubled since the mid-’70s
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more than $5,200. By the time the last Millennials (generally defined
as those born between 1981 and 1996
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entered college in the 2014 academic year, the cost had soared by
another 80 percent to roughly $9,500 a year. So far, the average
annual tuition cost has stayed at about that elevated level as the
first members of Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2014) have
started their studies.

As these numbers show, tuition at four-year public universities
increased more than three times as fast while Millennials attended
than it did over the span when most Baby Boomers did. The failure of
colleges to control their costs explains part of this disparity. But
it’s also a political decision at the state level. “The trend of
having students and their families pay more for their college today is
absolutely linked to the state disinvestment in higher education,”
Michele Siqueiros, the president of the California-based Campaign for
College Opportunity, told me.

Public colleges and universities relied on tuition and fees for only
about one-fifth of their total educational revenue in 1980, the first
year for which these figures are available, with state tax dollars
providing most of the rest. Today the share funded by tuition has more
than doubled, according to analysis
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the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. Even that
figure is somewhat misleading, because it includes community colleges,
which don’t rely as much on tuition. In four-year public colleges
and universities, tuition now provides a 52 percent majority of all
educational revenues nationwide. Even with some recent increases in
state contributions, 31 states now rely on tuition for a majority of
four-year public-college revenues, the executives’ association
found.

Even as those costs have increased, Pell Grants, the principal form of
federal aid for low-income students, have failed to keep pace. In
2000, Pell Grants covered 99 percent of the average costs of in-state
tuition and fees at public colleges, according to research by the
College Board [[link removed]].
Today, the grants fund only 60 percent of those costs—and only half
that much of the total bill when room and board are added on.

This historic shift in funding has occurred as college campuses have
grown more racially diverse. As recently as the late 1990s, white kids
still constituted 70 percent of all high-school graduates, according
to the federal National Center for Education Statistics
[[link removed]]. But
NCES estimates that students of color became a majority of high-school
graduates for the first time in the school year that ended this June.
Their share of future graduates will rise to nearly three-fifths by
the end of this decade, the NCES forecasts. That stream of future
high-school grads will further diversify the overall student body in
postsecondary institutions—especially in public colleges and
universities, where kids of color already constitute a slight majority
of those attending, according to figures provided to me by the
Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. (Most
private-college students, especially on the campuses considered most
elite, are still white.)

The inevitable result of less taxpayer help has been more debt for
public-school graduates. Even in the ’90s, only about one-third of
public-college graduates finished with debt, federal figures show. But
today a daunting 55 percent of public-college graduates leave with
debt, not much less than the share of students who finish with debt at
private schools (somewhere around 60 percent, depending on the data
source). What’s more, the average undergraduate debt held by
students from public colleges isn’t much less than that held by
those who attended private campuses
[[link removed]]. In effect,
as USC’s Myers noted, because states generally are prohibited from
borrowing to fund higher education (or anything else) by their
constitutions, “they pushed the borrowing onto the individual
families.”

This shift has hurt families of all types, but it’s been especially
difficult for the growing number of Black and Latino postsecondary
students. Those families have far less wealth than white families
[[link removed].] to
draw on to fund college. That increases pressure on kids of color to
borrow—and to support other family members after they graduate,
reducing their capacity to pay down their debts. To compound the
problem, as the Georgetown Center has repeatedly documented
[[link removed]], Black and Latino
students are heavily tracked into the least selective two- and
four-year public colleges, which have the smallest budgets and produce
the weakest outcomes, both in terms of graduation rates and future
earnings. White kids, the center calculates, still constitute
three-fifths of the total student body at the better-funded, more
exclusive “flagship” public universities, with Black and Latino
students together representing only one-fifth. “The money is going
to where the affluent and preponderantly white students are, and the
money is not going to where the minority and less advantaged students
are, which exacerbates the dropout crisis,” Anthony Carnevale, the
center’s director, told me.

The Republican attacks on Biden’s loan-forgiveness plan are aimed at
convincing the GOP base of older white voters, especially those
without a college education, that diverse younger Americans constitute
a threat to them. Yet compared with the taxpayer investments in the
first decades after World War II (in everything from education to
housing to roads) that helped so many of those Baby Boomers live
better lives than their parents, Biden’s plan represents only a
modest effort. 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.
Many of those arguing against debt forgiveness, Siqueiros told me,
seem to be conveniently forgetting all of the ways the government
provided “benefits to Baby Boomers.”

The irony is that it’s in Boomers’ self-interest to reduce the
debt burden on younger students. As they age into retirement, Boomers
are relying on younger generations to bear the payroll taxes that
sustain Social Security and Medicare. I’ve called these two giant
cohorts the brown and the gray
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and though our politics doesn’t often acknowledge it, there is no
financial security for the gray without more economic opportunity for
the brown.

The debt-forgiveness program, which White House officials pointedly
insisted to me was a “onetime” deal, is only the first of many
steps needed to equip those younger generations to succeed. The
college-debt crisis will simply repeat itself if Washington and the
states don’t pursue other policies to undo the burden shift toward
students—such as the free-community-college program, more generous
Pell Grants, and crackdown on predatory for-profit colleges that Biden
has proposed.

It’s reasonable to question whether Biden’s debt plan could have
been targeted more precisely or tweaked in myriad different ways. But
the plan got one very big thing right: All Americans will benefit if
our society provides today’s diverse younger generations with
anything approaching the investments we made in the Baby Boomers more
than half a century ago.

_RONALD BROWNSTEIN
[[link removed]] is a senior
editor at The Atlantic and a senior political analyst for CNN._

_THE ATLANTIC
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* Student Debt
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* Baby Boomers
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* Joe Biden
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* youth
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* Black youth
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* Hispanics
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