-We need student loan forgiveness.
We need at least a $50,000 minimum.
What will you do to make that happen?
-I will not make that happen.
I am prepared to write off a $10,000 debt.
-Forgiving student debt?
Seriously? -Yay!
-Oh, wait a minute.
What would that mean for Joe?
-I'm Joe Biden. -Not that Joe.
This Joe.
Joe represents your average American who took out a loan
to pay for some of their higher education.
30% of us are just like Joe.
Together, all of us average Joes in America are sitting on $1.
7 trillion of student debt.
It's a borrowing dumpster fire inside a train wreck.
-Dumpster fire inside a train wreck.
-Floating down a flooded river for many, many people.
So, there are a couple of reasons why we are now
staring down $1.
7 trillion worth of debt.
One of the largest ones, honestly,
is that there is just more people going to college
than a generation ago.
This is Danielle Douglas-Gabriel.
She covers the economics of education for "The Post."
Yeah, student loan debt is its own beat.
-And around the Great Recession is when you started to see
that huge influx of people attending school
as the job market was just starting to contract.
Now, as a result of state disinvestment and rising cost,
you have this kind of perfect storm,
and that storm brought new legislation.
So, prior to then, the federal government would pay private
lender a fee in order
to ensure that they would lend to students.
This old bank-based program became a big expensive,
and it was riddling with all sort of scandals.
So, around 2010, the Obama administration said,
"Well, hey, I think we can do this a lot cheaper
if we did it ourselves."
Now 90% of Joes have federal, not private, student loans.
But not all Joes are equal.
There's a majority disparity
in terms of who carries student debt
and how that impacts your daily life.
-You can't have an honest conversation
about student debt forgiveness
without talking about the racial wealth disparities.
There are a lot of African-Americans
that are borrowing more and at higher rates
than their white counterparts.
And a lot of that has to do with the legacy of labor-market
and housing-market discrimination.
Proponents of student loan forgiveness
say that debt forgiveness
would go a long way towards creating racial equity,
as well as narrowing some of the racial wealth gap.
-Now let's talk about the other Joe.
This Joe has the power to forgive everyone's student debt,
say $10,000 of it.
But many Democrats want him to be more aggressive,
asking him to cancel $50,000
in debt per borrower through executive order.
-There's very little that the president could do
with the flick of a pen that would boost our economy
more than canceling $50,000 in student debt.
-Opponents of this particular strategy say,
"Well, that would disproportionately benefit
people who have advanced degrees."
-Excuse me. I'm here to see my father.
My name is Rachel Green.
-And I'm Dr. Ross Geller.
-Ross, please, this is a hospital, okay?
That actually means something here.
-Whereas students can now borrow up to the cost of attendance.
Now, that might mean anywhere from $50,000 to $60,000
to $80,000 a year.
Undergraduates can only borrow no more than,
say, $28,000 from the federal government.
-Alright, Nick, don't panic. Think back to med school.
-So, if you're one of those 42 million Joes
who borrowed money to go to college, would you benefit?
-If there were even $10,000 worth of loan forgiveness,
it would be federal loan forgiveness,
not private student loans.
Now, there are all these other caveats.
So, if you're part of that old bank-based program,
these are called FFEL loans, right?
We're talking about 7 million-or-so people
who have those loans.
Would they be a part of that?
We don't know yet, but that is something to keep in mind.
The other question is, will parent loans be a part
of any kind of forgiveness?
That's another part of it to watch.
For these senior who has amassed $30,000 worth of debt,
this policy would not benefit them as it
is currently being discussed.
It's really focusing on people
who are currently in repayment on their loans, not in college.
-Regardless of what happens,
there will be some who feel it's unfair --
those who already paid off their student debt
or didn't have any in the first place
or maybe the people who didn't get higher education
because they thought they couldn't afford it.
-There are a lot of people who worked very hard
to pay down their loans and to pay off their debt,
but there are a lot of programs that, as taxpayers, we pay into
that we may never seen the individual benefit for.
A lot of folks think, "Well, people with college degrees
can definitely afford to take care of themself.
Why should I have to foot the burden for them?"
Well, if you lighten the burden of one additional bill
that then can be deployed
in a way that can help the economy,
well, then the argument about the fairness
seems less important.