Life led Elizabeth Hadzic and Kim Coles to bankruptcy court.
Hadzic, 50, a psychotherapist in Maryland, doesn’t make enough to support herself and her adult son, whose health struggles set her back thousands of dollars. Coles, an accountant in Oregon in her late 60s, was laid off last year.
Both have tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt. Although they have been making payments on those loans for years, they no longer can. And both, in the absence of an alternative, have resorted to taking the costly, typically unsuccessful route of trying to get their loans discharged in bankruptcy court.
That’s where things diverge.
For Hadzic, bankruptcy is proving to be the answer to her financial woes. After months of litigation, she’s on track for a full discharge. In Coles’ case, the government is putting up a fight − though she is of retirement age − against discharging the balance of a loan she’s been paying down for more than a decade.
“I always paid my student loans,” Coles said in an interview. “I was never late.”
The disparity in how the government is treating their cases is indicative of the intractability of one of the country’s most extreme and inaccessible forms of student debt relief, as the Biden administration grapples with finding alternatives to the kind of sweeping student loan forgiveness option that the Supreme Court struck down in June.
I am on board with cancelling some student debt for those who are struggling, but I wonder if this is a good long term solution. How do we stop getting overburdened graduates into the debt machine at 22? Do we lower tuition costs, make college free, talk kids out of going, giving more government grants to low income students?
If the taxpayers are going to socialize anything I’d prefer to start with healthcare. That impacts everyone.
You can socialize more than one thing at a time. Student loan debt affects everyone too. We have an entire generation right now who can’t afford to buy a house, and who are putting off marriage and having kids. That effects the entire economy. Not to mention they can’t save for retirement if a good chunk of their income is going into student loan debt.
A few counters to this:
Given that public opinion weighs so heavily on the ability to get anything done, healthcare, to me, seems like an easier win. Focus on one thing, get it done right, make people happy, get elected to a second term.
Student loans do not affect everyone. College attendance is declining and nobody ever dies from not having a bachelor’s.
Home prices and interest rates are out of control, but neither has anything to do with student loans. Home prices have risen at way beyond inflationary rates to beyond what is affordable even for those without debt. Other factors are at play here.
Stopping the student loan program would be a good start. It would cause some people to not be able to go to college, but it would likely save far more from a debt trap. Stopping loans would also apply a huge downward force on tuition, which may actually help more people afford to go to college in the first place.
Maybe after a few years of no loans, a grant system could be created. It would pay participating universities directly, if they agreed to some level of affordable tuition. You could tie additional grant money to performance objectives that are harder to game like graduation rates, job placement, average salary of recent graduates, and performance of the bottom quintile.
Interesting to think about. I wonder how much schools would need to scale back to make a noticable difference in tuition and what jobs would be cut in the process. At a time when private colleges are already struggling, it might be difficult to find the fat to trim.
Admin jobs would be cut. The vast majority of tuition increases have not gone to the faculty, who teach the classes.
There’s tons of administrative fat. Also admission staff could be cut because of reduced enrollment. Financial aid departments would lose 90% of their options, so could be reduced.
I assume the schools would just partner with a bank and offer their own loans at that point. Similar to those store credit card scams
Healthcare is a good start, but education is the biggest investment we can possibly make. Why not both, though? The money exists.
Well, sure, the money exists, but it’s not for those people
Pre George W. Bush, it was perfectly legal to discharge student debt in bankruptcy. That made loans harder to get, and consequently, kept college prices from these insane increases.