The Morality of Cancelling Student Loan Debt
As an ethicist who studies the morality of debt, I see merit in the question: Should student debt be canceled?
President-elect Joe Biden promised to forgive at least some student debt during his campaign, and he now supports immediately canceling US$10,000 per borrower as part of COVID-19 relief measures.
Such proposals are likely to be quite popular. A poll from 2019 found that 58% of voters support canceling all federal student debt.
But there are those who question the idea of debt forgiveness and call it unfair to those who never took out student debt or already paid it off.
As an ethicist who studies the morality of debt, I see merit in the question: Should student debt be canceled?
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article, by Kate Padgett Walsh, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Iowa State University, here.
The Moral Case Against Canceling
$25,000physicalmentalfamily stability
career satisfactioncanceling student debt appearsImmanuel Kant
The Moral Case for Canceling
70% of college students$13,000 to about $30,000$1.5 trillionsecond largestJustin Lewiston and I argue in an articleJohn Rawls
Students hold a demonstration in New York to protest against ballooning student loan debt.
defaultrepay only 5%graduation ratesengage20% less than white men10% less than students whose parents graduated20% of student borrowersphysicalmentalfamilieshomesbusinessesdisproportionatelyDeep knowledge, daily.Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter
Avoiding Moral Hazard
Some analystsincreased enrollmentwhile reducing borrowing by over 25%
