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'Death Should Not Be the Only Relief': Seniors Lead Their First Action Against Student Debt
"This week for the first time in history, older student debtors have gone to Washington to demand our student loan debts get canceled in our lifetime, not at our funerals," one older debtor said.
Sep 13, 2024
Carrying mock tombstones reading, "Death is not a relief plan" and "Stop burying us in debt," a group of older debtors held the first-ever senior-led mass action for student debt relief outside the White House on Thursday.
Borrowers over 50 are the fastest-growing demographic of student debtors, and some of them are calling on the Biden-Harris administration to take advantage of federal regulations that empower the Department of Education to cancel debt based on age.
"The only comprehensive student debt relief plan that the federal government offers right now is death," Debt Collective creative media strategist Maddie Clifford said in front of the White House. "That is the only way people can escape from these student loan payments."
The participants in the vigil, who collectively owe more than $1 million in student loans and include members of the Debt Collective's "50 Over 50" caucus, shared their stories as they demanded relief.
"I would have never imagined approaching my 60th birthday with $211,388 worth of student debt," said Renita Walker, a Debt Collective member from Sandy Springs, Georgia. "The idea itself is paralyzing. It is the realization that I will probably work myself to death, literally."
Walker took out loans both to continue her education as a single mother after her husband died and to help her two children pay for school. The loan payments ballooned to the point that she was paying $1,800 a month until she took money out of her 401(k) to bring the payment down to around $1,300 a month, still more than her mortgage.
"I just want to say like many of the people here standing behind me, this was not something we asked for," Walker said. "Unfortunately, the system is broken and we have to live with the results of that."
"For decades, millions of older debtors have crouched in shame, imagining ourselves as failures when in reality the system has failed us. But we will no longer be duped into suffering alone."
Fellow Debt-Collective member and Georgia resident Athena Blue, a 67-year-old retired nurse, also took out Parent Plus loans to pay for her children's education.
Blue spoke of overcoming the shame of indebtedness by learning the history of how former U.S. President Ronald Reagan had pushed for the current student loan system in order to make it more difficult for working-class Americans to attend university as a backlash to campus protests in the 1960s and 70s.
"The debt that I'm in isn't my fault," Blue said. "It was created purposely by people like former President Ronald Reagan who believed that only certain people should have the right to higher education."
Blue said she had managed to pay off all of her interest on her loan in 2020 when it was transferred to another provider and she had to start over.
"This burden of a loan threatens my retirement," Blue said, "So how can you, Congress, the Department of Education, and the White House allow this to continue? How can you allow seniors to be subject to predators like this? Have you no moral compass? No shame?"
Debt Collective member Alicia Barnes, who joined the Navy to avoid taking on any more debt, said she had discovered in a meeting with the Department of Education that day that her service provider had illegally placed her debt into default while she was deployed.
"Instead of including a Suicide Hotline for veterans on every piece of communication we receive, the causes of these tragedies should be met with real solutions including absolving some of the debt we accrued during our service because of this compounded interest and illegal activity by these debt collectors," Barnes said.
Every speaker at Thursday's vigil was a woman, as are the majority of student loan debtors. A disproportionate number of student debtors are Black women in particular.
Many of the speakers went into debt to pursue careers in public service fields like education, pastoral counseling, and social work.
"We are caring human beings that wanted to help out the world," said Debt Collective member Mary Donahue of Maryland. "We just need a little help."
The Debt Collective insists that "death should not be the only relief plan for their old, unpayable student loans."
"Decades of broken student relief programs, corrupt loan services, and government neglect have meant that millions of older Americans dragged decadesold student debts into their retirement," said Gail Gardner, who is 77 years old and owes $549,497.20. "Absent swift, bold policy change, and clear political leadership, this crisis will only deepen. The debtors will get older. The debts will get bigger."
That is why she said she had joined with other older debtors to "demand the White House and the Department of Education finally take responsibility for clearing the student debts burdening myself and millions of older Americans."
Both Gardner and Clifford pointed out that discharging debts based on age was something that the Biden-Harris administration could do without running afoul of right-wing attempts to block President Joe Biden's other attempts at student debt relief.
"We are urging the Biden Harris administration to work as fast and as hard as Republicans are working to keep us in debt to free borrowers from these loans, and they can do it today," Clifford said.
Gardner concluded: "For decades, millions of older debtors have crouched in shame, imagining ourselves as failures when in reality the system has failed us. But we will no longer be duped into suffering alone. This week for the first time in history, older student debtors have gone to Washington to demand our student loan debts get canceled in our lifetime, not at our funerals. We can't afford to wait."
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Supreme Court Denies Biden Administration's Request to Reinstate Expanded Title IX Rule
In a 5-4 ruling—with Justice Neil Gorsuch joining the liberals in dissent—the court delayed Biden's expansion of Title IX protections to include gender identity and sexual orientation.
Aug 16, 2024
The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday denied the Biden administration's emergency request to reinstate parts of its updated Department of Education Title IX rule expanding the definition of "discrimination on the basis of sex" to include sexual orientation, gender identity, and pregnancy status.
The nation's highest court ruled 5-4—with conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch joining liberal colleagues Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in dissent—that the Biden administration "has not provided this court a sufficient basis to disturb the lower courts' interim conclusions that the three provisions found likely to be unlawful are intertwined with and affect other provisions of the rule."
Republican attorneys general in more than two dozen states pushed courts to block the Biden administration's updated Title IX rule, which was set to take effect on August 1. The new rule has been on hold pending the outcome of litigation.
In her dissent, Sotomayor wrote: "A majority of this court leaves in place preliminary injunctions that bar the government from enforcing the entire rule—including provisions that bear no apparent relationship to respondents' alleged injuries. Those injunctions are overbroad."
While conservatives welcomed the ruling, LGBTQ+ advocates expressed disappointment.
"All young people deserve to show up to school and get an education without facing the threat of discrimination and bigotry. But five cruel justices on the Supreme Court just put countless LGBTQ+ students' health, safety, and lives in jeopardy," said Sarah Lipton-Lubet, president of the advocacy group Take Back the Court.
"The hateful right-wing movement with which these justices align themselves constantly invokes 'protecting children' as a false justification for their extremist agenda," Lipton-Lubet added. "But protecting children means keeping them safe from homophobic and transphobic violence; from gun violence; from attacks on equitable education; and from environmental destruction that threatens their futures. This court has failed them time and time again."
The Biden administration's effort to expand Title IX protections came amid a wave of anti-LGBTQ+ laws enacted in Republican-controlled states in recent years.
More than two dozen states have passed laws banning or restricting gender-affirming healthcare including puberty-blocking drugs, hormone therapy, and surgery for minors. At least 11 states have also passed laws banning transgender students from using school restrooms and other facilities consistent with their gender identity, and 25 states have banned transgender girls from competing on female scholastic sports teams.
Responding to Friday's decision, an Education Department spokesperson said that "while we do not agree with this ruling, the department stands by the final Title IX regulations released in April 2024, and we will continue to defend those rules in the expedited litigation in the lower courts."
Friday's ruling is not the last word on the Biden administration's Title IX rule, as the decision merely delays the issue pending further litigation that could ultimately be revisited by the Supreme Court in the future.
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Why Student Loan Debt Harms Low-Income Students the Most
May 03, 2016
Four years ago, student loan debt in America topped $1 trillion. Today, that number has swelled even further, with some 43 million Americans feeling the enduring gravity of $1.3 trillion in student loan debt.
While student debt may not intuitively register as something that plagues the poor, student debt delinquency and defaults are concentrated in low-income areas, even though lower-income borrowers also tend to have much smaller debts. Defaults and delinquencies among low-income Americans escalated following the Great Recession of 2008, a period when many states disinvested from public colleges and universities. The result was higher costs of college, which has led to larger loans.
Low-income students are often left at a dramatic academic disadvantage in the first place. For example, students who work full-time on top of college classes can't cover the cost of tuition or living expenses, and working while in school can actually shrink the chance of graduating altogether. Moreover, these students are less likely to have access to career counseling or outside financial resources to help them pay for school, making the payoff negligible at best.
The inequity is so crushing that an alarming number of these students--predominantly students of color--are dropping out of school altogether. One-third of low-income student borrowers at public four-year schools drop out, a rate 10 percent higher than the rest of student borrowers overall.
When it comes to for-profit colleges, the story gets even worse. These institutions often target prospective students who are low-income while falsely assuring positive job and economic prospects upon graduating. Many students do end up dropping out, and even those who do graduate do not always receive a quality education that leaves them prepared for success--or with an income that matches up with their monthly loan payments. Their degrees too often cannot compete in the job market, leaving many of these students jobless.
A dream of a higher education shouldn't be a sentence to years--or an entire lifetime--of poverty.
This confluence of factors explains why borrowers who owe the least tend to be lower-income and are the most likely to fall behind or default on their monthly payments. As the Mapping Student Debt project has found, people with more debt are less likely to default on their loan payments because they have the most access to wealth, whether through family money or financial assets or educational degrees. And it's not hard to connect the dots. The biggest borrowers tend to be the biggest earners, so those who take out large loans to pay for graduate or professional school are less likely to default or fall behind because they're in high-earning jobs. The Department of Education estimated that 7 percent of graduate borrowers default versus 22 percent of those who only borrow for undergraduate studies. The default can actually lead to an increase in student loan debt because of late fees and interest, as well as a major decline in credit, ineligibility for additional student aid, and even wage garnishment at the request of the federal government.
Fortunately, there are solutions already in place that can help borrowers get out of default and back on their feet. For borrowers with federal loans, the Department of Education has a number of income-driven repayment programs (IDR) that cap a borrower's monthly payment to as low as 10 percent of their discretionary income. Rather than being saddled with debt and an income that doesn't realistically allow for repayment, borrowers can take advantage of programs such as PAYE, REPAYE, and Income-Based-Repayment to make their monthly loan payments proportional to their income. And some low-income borrowers might even qualify to pay nothing at all if they fall beneath certain income levels.
These plans won't just help borrowers with high debt balances. IDR is especially helpful for borrowers with smaller balances because it reduces the monthly burden while keeping more money in their pockets to cover expenses for food, housing, and other basic needs that borrowers must choose between in the face of overwhelming monthly payments.
Yet woefully few borrowers are aware of these plans, which have the potential to ensure low-income borrowers aren't paying more than they can afford. Fully 51 percent of student loan borrowers nationwide are eligible for these programs, but only 15 percent are enrolled.
A dream of a higher education shouldn't be a sentence to years—or an entire lifetime—of poverty. With federal IDR programs, paying back any amount of student debt can be much less draining of an obligation, especially for our most vulnerable citizens. It's on all of us to ensure those who can benefit the most from IDR are aware of it.
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