Emma Green

There's so much political salience to it.

And that's paired with this other running current that is bipartisan and very widely held in America, this idea that higher education isn't that good of a deal.

It's really expensive.

People are under these crushing loads of debt.

And often people get out of school after having worked really hard and they can't get a job that pays them a living wage.

This idea that, you know, the bargain of higher ed, you go to college and you better yourself, you better your family, you better the next generation.

People don't believe that that fair deal is playing out.

And so what a lot of people said to me as I was reporting this story is that this sort of cultural frisson of all of the cultural wars on campus gave political permission to go farther.

So I don't think it was that Obama and Biden were blind to this.

In fact, I think Biden and the fact that he took on student debt as such a central part of his policymaking showed that they see the populist anger here.

That's right.

They're sort of taking on all of the discontent around higher ed from this different angle.

They have different solutions, and they also don't share the analysis of the cultural solutions.

It's sort of like an equal and opposite reaction, right?

Biden was trying to take this on in a huge way, and Trump is now taking this on in a huge way.

So I talked to this guy, James Cavall.

who was an undersecretary at the Department of Education under President Biden, but he'd also worked in the Obama administration and the Clinton administration.

He's just a Democrat policy guy through and through.

And he was the person in charge of implementing the structural reforms in the Biden administration.

So a lot of their projects to eliminate student debt, for example, were under James Cavill.