Eliminating student debt isn’t progressive

By David Leonhardt.

"The fatal flaw of universal student-debt cancellation is that it’s not, in fact, progressive. It mostly benefits the upper middle class. “Education debt,” as Sandy Baum and Victoria Lee of the Urban Institute have written, “is disproportionately concentrated among the well-off.” The highest-earning quarter of the population holds about half of all student debt, according to Baum and Lee. Which means that universal student debt cancellation would be a giant welfare program for the bourgeoisie."

"A recent Brookings Institution study by Judith Scott-Clayton found that the loan-default rate for borrowers with a bachelor’s degree was less than 8 percent. The default rate for borrowers without any degree was a miserable 40 percent.

I know that some four-year college graduates really are struggling. But this country has too many big problems to start showering the upper-middle-class with enormous government benefits."