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Friday’s Supreme Court decision striking down President Biden’s student loan cancellation plan has left a lot of borrowers wondering: Where do we go from here?
“I would say Congress needs to pass this, but that’s not going to happen,” says Graeme Strickland, a 25-year-old borrower in Raleigh, N.C. “It’s become a culture war around this issue. And like, this is my income. This affects the money I’m able to spend on groceries.”
Strickland attended the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, as an in-state student. In order to attend, he had to take out roughly $30,000 in federal loans, which is on par with the national average for a bachelor’s degree from a public institution.
He graduated in 2020 at the height of the pandemic, and has yet to consider loan payments or interest yet – both have been on pause since he was a student. Now, with Biden’s student loan relief plan officially dead, and payments set to resume in the fall, Strickland has resigned himself to his new debt-laden reality.
“So in terms of loan forgiveness, where do we go from here? I don’t think there’s anywhere we can go.”
If Strickland sounds defeated, he’s not alone.
For years, borrowers have been left in a holding pattern waiting for the path to debt cancellation that President Biden promised on the campaign trail. His administration finally announced his plan for student loans last August, canceling up to $20,000 for qualifying borrowers.
But the Supreme Court’s recent ruling has overturned the program, and put the final nail in the coffin on widespread debt relief.”There was no trust before. There is no trust now.”
Carolina Rodriguez spends her days talking to borrowers like Strickland at New York’s Education Debt Consumer Assistance Program (EDCAP). She says such feelings of defeat and resignation aren’t unusual.
“There was no trust before. There is no trust now,” she says. Most borrowers she speaks to these days are more focused on other paths to forgiveness, such as Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) and income-driven repayment (IDR) plans.
Under the Biden administration, she’s seen investment in these programs and a deluge of changes to the student loan landscape: “We sometimes joke in the advocacy community, it’s like a decade’s worth of changes in two years.”
And with the influx of new policies has come a new relationship with deadlines. Rodriguez says her staff has come to expect extensions and last minute changes – so have borrowers. She rarely gets calls anymore about the impending restart to federal student loan payments because, she says, borrowers have been here before.
