Your Money, Your Vote: What the Election Could Mean for Student Loans
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Here's your Money Briefing for Sunday, September 29th. I'm J.R. Whalen for The Wall Street Journal. This is the third installment of our special series, Your Money, Your Votes. Today we're focusing on where the 2024 presidential candidates stand on something that can cost anywhere from a few grand to hundreds of thousands of dollars, a college degree. And many people borrow money and go into debt to pay for that degree. More than 43 million people in the U.S. currently hold federal student loans, totaling more than $1.5 trillion, according to the Government Accountability Office. Last year, President Joe Biden's broad forgiveness plan was struck down by the Supreme Court. Since then, the administration has rolled out programs that wipe out college debt for some groups.
But efforts to get widespread forgiveness have been tied up in courts. The uncertainty has left many Americans in a tough spot.
I'm going to be looking at essentially almost half a million dollars worth of student loan debt, which is crazy to even say out of my mouth.
That's 27-year-old Aminta Scott. She's a second-year medical student in Indianapolis. She's taken out a mix of private and federal loans to finance her undergraduate and master's degrees and is now on her way to a medical degree.
What is the episode’s focus on student loans and why does it matter for voters?
One of the things that I kind of have to sacrifice is financial freedom, or at least obtaining it much, much later in life. Like, I truly don't expect to even be looking at that until... mid-40s earliest, probably around my 50s. There's just a lot that I'm set back with this career.
A survey from Bankrate released this June showed that almost one in five Americans say student debt will have a major influence on their vote this year. And 29% of borrowers say it'll be a key factor in their decision. But student debt is just part of the equation. For example, the real cost of a four-year college degree climbed 180 percent between 1980 and 2020. So how do Vice President and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and former President and Republican nominee Donald Trump compare on student loan forgiveness and tackling the cost of higher education?
at the high price of a college education.
Struggling with the rising cost of tuition. The cost of a four-year degree is not only rising, but requires... Cost of education. You hear it all over the news. It's the all-in cost of school, tuition, books, room and board. Living expenses are all jumbled into that term. So when we're trying to answer the question about where Harris and Trump stand on tackling the cost of education and the trillions of dollars of debt because of it, we have to look at the complete picture. To start off, I wanted to know if the past two administrations, Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020, made a dent in the cost of education. So I asked Jillian Berman. She's a deputy editor at MarketWatch, which is part of Dow Jones, along with The Wall Street Journal.
She covers student loans and consumer debt.
So during the Trump administration, he took a few steps to try to deal with college costs. Probably the most famous is the endowment tax that came as part of the 2017 tax law that he pushed. And so that placed a small tax on endowments at wealthy schools. It didn't have a huge immediate impact on college costs just because You know, it really only hit the wealthiest schools. Those schools tend to provide a lot of financial aid. But people on both sides of the aisle have suggested that sort of taxing endowments more heavily could be one way to push schools to spend their endowments in a way that helps make school more affordable for students. A couple of other things the Trump administration did was they walked back some tax
sort of regulations that the Obama administration had put in regarding for-profit colleges.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:41
2
What is the episode’s focus on student loans and why does it matter for voters?
1:41–7:44
3
How widespread is student-loan debt and what are borrowers’ real-life experiences?
7:44–12:19
4
How have college costs changed over time and what counts in the ‘cost of a degree’?
12:19–15:57
Speakers
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