BY MARK S. JAMES
This week, President Biden announced his most ambitious plan to forgive student loan debt since the US Supreme Court ruled his last sweeping effort unconstitutional last year. I’ve written about my own experience with student loan debt forgiveness and being what I call “post-debt.” The journal that published the article is based in Germany. As I recall, in the early stages I was asked to verify that I really meant that I owed as much as I owed when my loans were finally forgiven under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program.
It’s more than a year since my loans were forgiven, and I now feel it as an unmitigated relief. (I describe my earlier ambivalence in the article.) I still feel extremely lucky that I was one of the still too few who were able to benefit directly from the Biden administration’s efforts. I remember a colleague of mine calling me to joyfully tell me that her loans had been forgiven, too. She told me before she even told her husband because, some years earlier, I had been the one to convince her that she qualified for the PSLF. I believe she didn’t think she qualifed because we work at a private university.
On the other hand, my spouse qualified for the proposed blanket forgiveness plan of $10,000 for those earning less than $120,000 that SCOTUS ruled unconstitutional. We are currently back in repayment. Her bill is certainly much more manageable than mine was because I now make enough as an associate professor that we can afford the payments without sacrificing our necessities. But just a little more than a decade ago I would have had to request a forbearance on even that amount just to cover my basic expenses.
We are child-free (aside from a chihuahua who, as far as we know, sits at the center of the known universe), house-free (though our rent is too damn high), and we still live like graduate students. Well, my spouse is a graduate student. She is not currently taking out student loans in part because the money we didn’t have to pay on my student loan payments made it possible to save for her to go to graduate school in Europe. There the cost of graduate school is much more reasonable, even for international students (at least for now).
We have a bit of breathing room for now. That is all thanks to the current administration’s efforts to make the PSLF program work as it was supposed to. But, as I said in the article, living post-debt I’m still decades behind in terms of retirement savings, and nowhere where they say I should be to retire comfortably. Even though my student loans have been forgiven, they will continue to affect me and my family the rest of our lives. As I write this I know there are thousands of others who are paying hundreds of dollars to student loan servicers that could be going elsewhere in our current economy, and also losing out on the opportunity to save for retirement. Opponents of student loan forgiveness should keep in mind that it is probably much cheaper to forgive loans now with the knowledge that at least a portion of it will go towards savings that will have a greater benefit for all in the long-run.
Contributing editor Mark S. James is associate professor of English at Molloy University, president of Molloy’s AAUP chapter, and a member of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure.
