About five centuries ago in the year 2015, you may recall a raging debate about a photo of a dress. Viewers of the image were ferociously split as to whether the garment was colored black and blue, or white and gold. It became a virtual Hunger Games overnight, with everyone from families at the dinner table to politicians in Congress taking a side. Not much has quite divided the internet like that since the era of The Dress, but this past week, student-loan relief became a solid contender. And it’s no wonder why: About 1 in 5 Americans have student loans. Jonathan Bernstein says the “fever-pitch rhetoric” surrounding President Joe Biden’s decision to forgive up to $20,000 in student loans is a lawmaking lesson in disguise. Legislators are constantly sleuthing around on the interwebs, looking for something — anything! — to excite their supporters. Biden’s campaign promise on student-loan relief was one such thing, and the debate surrounding the decision has gotten heated, chaotic and extremely intense. Although we all have Very Strong Opinions about whether student-loan forgiveness is a wise move, not everyone has the data to back up their stance. So let’s start with the basics. In 2015, the year of The Dress, total student-loan debt in the US was sitting pretty at $1.2 trillion. Today, that figure has risen by a handsome amount: More than 90% of the 45 million Americans who are burdened with federal student-loan debt will see some form of relief with Biden’s plan, and an estimated 20 million borrowers will be free of student debt once the policy is put into action. But Bloomberg’s editorial board argues that any iteration of student-loan forgiveness is regressive, because: - It hurts the 60% of Americans who didn’t graduate college.
- It helps the wealthiest two-fifths of Americans.
- It will cost taxpayers gazillions of dollars.
- It adds flames to the inflation fire.
- It will encourage people to take out MOAR loans.
It sounds bad. But what’s the alternative? Millions of Americans have long relied on federal loans to cover the costs of higher education, and the breakdown in sums they owe might surprise you: The Great American Debt Landscape has evolved rapidly over the past decade, with student loans taking the lead around 2010, toppling other forms of debt like auto loans and credit-card bills: Overall, the debt load is somehow more uneven than your pandemic haircut (which was bad!!!), with some states clocking in way higher loan amounts than others: But geographic divides aren’t the only ones when it comes to who owes student loans. “A 2016 study found that four years after earning a bachelor’s degree, the average Black graduate had about $53,000 in debt, nearly twice the level of the average White graduate,” Carl Romer and Andre Perry wrote earlier this year — a consequence of what they call “federally engineered inequality.” Decades of redlining prevented Black families from accumulating wealth in the housing market, while White families had no trouble doing so and ascending the path of upward mobility. This inequality seeps directly into higher education, Romer and Perry argue, because similarly qualified students end up graduating with very different debt loads depending on their race and family circumstances:  Another factor to consider is age, with older Americans uniquely hard-hit. Alexis Leondis writes that retirees are often “smothered by student debt in their senior years” because they have fixed incomes with little financial wiggle-room. Sometimes the student debt they owe is their own — if they took out loans for extra schooling to earn more money later in life, for example. But often it’s loans they took out to help their children or grandchildren. Americans age 62 and older are the fastest-growing segment of student debtors, and a ton of them are currently stuck in a never-ending student-debt doom spiral: Some of them are forced to resort to dip into their Social Security benefits if they default — a practice that Alexis says Biden should end ASAP. As it stands, the government’s plan doesn’t provide enough of a lifeline to alleviate these struggling seniors’ financial burdens. Unlike other forms of debt, people can’t simply discharge their federal or private student loans in bankruptcy. If graduate students were able to drop their loans in that manner, Allison Schrager says it would force lenders to actually look at the risks involved when making these loans in the first place. “In no other industry would a debt-financed investment that’s the equivalent of going to medical school be considered the same as a film-studies degree,” she writes. The average debt load for students getting a master’s degree is about $75,000, which is well over double the average sum that undergrads borrow: Clive Crook argues that professionals in their 20s can be in a solid financial position despite having student debt: “Future doctors and lawyers might be making nothing at that point. This doesn’t mean they’re poor,” he writes. Perhaps measuring the loan relief by predicted lifetime earnings would have been a more appropriate route for the White House. Over the past two years, nearly everyone took advantage of the student-loan moratorium, even households in the highest income quartile (earning over $121,317), which carry 34% of total federal student loan debt. But come 2023, student-loan payments will come roaring back, with Biden calling the latest extension the seventh and final one. Now is a great time to start rejiggering your budget plans ahead of the restart. No matter which way you slice or dice the data, there’s an overwhelming and undeniable amount of froth in higher education. In the same way that everyone agrees that The Dress was in fact, a dress, everyone understands that the student-debt doom cycle is a beast that needs to be tamed, one way or another. | 
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