The White House is planning to forgive around a half-trillion dollars of student debt — and even liberals admit a lot is going to upwardly-mobile white professionals.
SO WHAT
But aren’t Democrats supposed to be champions of the marginalized?
THE NUMBERS
The student loan forgiveness component of President Biden’s plan will cost around $519 billion, according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model, and a quarter is going to borrowers making over $82,000, well over the median household income.
High-income white individuals hold a larger share of total student debt and are also more likely to incur debt on the way to earning lucrative professional degrees.
- 63% of all student debt is held by white Americans, and white households in the top fifth of wealth distribution hold 25% of all student debt, more than all African-American borrowers combined, according to the Brookings Institution.
- Average debt incurred for professional degrees ranges from $119,000 for a legal degree to $170,000 for a medical degree and $242,000 for a dental degree.
- Whites are twice as likely to hold a professional degree as their African-American peers.
THE REACTION
Many liberal Democrats are finding it hard to square student loan forgiveness with the party’s traditional claim to represent working class, blue collar Americans.
However student loan forgiveness may signal a Democratic move to consolidate their new base of college-educated voters, who favored Biden over Trump by double digits in 2020.
- In July Axios’ Josh Kraushaar described a “seismic shift” in American politics, as “Democrats are becoming the party of upscale voters concerned more about issues like gun control and abortion rights,” while “Republicans are quietly building a multiracial coalition of working-class voters, with inflation as an accelerant.”
- Leftwing scholar Ruy Teixera, who recently left the liberal Center for American Progress think tank for the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, argued in 2020: “Biden’s improvements in performance relative to Hillary Clinton in 2016 — the improvements that enabled him to beat Donald Trump while Clinton lost — are almost entirely attributable to improved support among whites, especially white college-educated voters. That is, the proximate reason for Biden’s victory had little to do with the race-ethnic diversification trends highlighted by the Census.”
- “It did not appear to bother them in 2020, nor does it appear likely to bother them in 2022, that their party’s character and coalition keep skewing toward white college graduates,” Teixera continued. “Consciously or not, this is the track the party is currently on—the cultural left turn of the party makes no sense outside of that context. Between 2012 and 2020, the Democratic advantage among nonwhite working class voters declined by 19 points, while the Democratic advantage increased among white college graduates by 16 points. Stay tuned for more of the same.”