whereas at graduate level, because those students can borrow virtually without limit." "The other thing that would also be a no-brainer is having different criteria for graduate loans than you do for undergraduate loans," Gillen said, "because we really do restrict how much you can borrow at the undergraduate level. For couples filing jointly, the cap would be around $250,000 or $300,000.
At the same time, he added, any broad-based forgiveness would be like saying that "a handful of people that are struggling here, let's get rid of the debt for everybody."Īn income cap on who qualified for any loan forgiveness would be a "no brainer," Gillen added, because it would help target the relief towards lower-income struggling debtors.īiden is reportedly considering capping forgiveness to those who earned less than $125,000 or $150,000 as individual filers the previous year, The Washington Post reported recently. "There there are people who are struggling to repay their debt, and we've got an existing set of solutions - and those solutions aren't working," he acknowledged, such as the massive failure of the income-driven repayment system. These include the overall cost and the fact that forgiveness does not directly address the core issue of rising college costs.Ĭancelling $10,000 or $50,000 across the board is "really badly targeted," Gillen said in an interview with Yahoo Finance. Some right-leaning academics, including Andrew Gillen of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, argue that there are a variety of problems with cancelling student loan debt. Every instance of a student loan was a voluntary choice that person made." "To my knowledge, everyone with student loans voluntarily took them. "How can we honestly ask people who did not go to college to subsidize the lives of those who did decide to go to college?" Bach added. And given that any broad-based forgiveness would cost tens of billions of dollars, all taxpayers - not just by those who have a college degree - would be contributing to the cost of cancellation. Research has shown that a college degree generally boosts an individual's earnings over their lifetime. "While some may view this debt forgiveness as a slap in the face to people who were responsible and paid off their student loans, this is a bigger slap in the face to those Americans who never went to college," Will Bach, a financial advisor based in Ohio, told Yahoo Finance. As the president weighs broad student loan forgiveness, some Americans expressing frustration over a policy they see as unfair.