What Will It Take for Joe Biden to Cancel Student Loan Debt?
By: Jared Clemons
Tags: Biden, Debt, Higher Education, Students, Student Loans

Although it is now taken for granted that a college degree is a fail-safe, if not a completely necessary precondition for economic stability, that has not always been the case. Rather, political-economic circumstances during the 1960s produced this common-sense understanding of higher education as the ticket to the good life.

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During this period of slow economic growth, political elites began to assert education as a form of human capital whose value could be realized on two dimensions. On one level, allowing more Americans to have access to higher education would, according to this logic, engender a future workforce that was more skilled and, thus, productive. This productivity would, in turn, stimulate the growth of the capitalist economy.

On another level, expanding the bounds of higher education would mean that more individuals could be absorbed into this system — namely, those whose racial and gender status had historically precluded their admission into academe. Unsurprisingly, how to make this happen rested on the timeworn political question of “where would the money come from?”

One answer was student loans.

Lyndon Johnson signed the Higher Education Act into law in 1965, establishing grants for low-income students (later renamed as “Pell Grants”), as well as loans for those ineligible for these grants but who needed additional assistance paying their tuition. However, Reagan slashed federal funding for Pell Grants, part and parcel of his general attack on social programs and the idea of the public good more broadly.

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Naturally, fewer and smaller Pell Grants meant that more individuals were required to “finance” their education through student loans, effectively turning a college degree into a private investment rather than a social good. It is not surprising, then, that many students have opted for high-paying fields such as business and marketing, which have exploded over the past few decades, while enrollment in the humanities has plummeted. This is a rational (if somewhat regrettable) decision that many students (expected to act as rational consumers) make, given that the former tends to offer monetary payoffs more significant than the letter. It is, in neoliberal parlance, a better investment.

Reshaping the university in a corporate image was, of course, all a part of the bitter class war waged by the corporate elite against working people — a class war which, as Noam Chomsky suggests, is the essence of neoliberalism.

This corporate assault on higher education has had profound consequences, particularly for our ability to cultivate a democratic polity—implications that should be apparent given this moment of democratic backsliding. As Wendy Brown explains in Undoing the Demos: Neoliberal’s Stealth Revolution:

These economic and cultural shifts, the new college ranking systems that endorse them, along with the dismal contemporary economics of higher education itself exert enormous pressures on colleges and universities and especially on liberal arts curriculums to abandon all aims and ends other than making students “shovel ready” when they graduate. Other values — of being a well-educated or worldly person, of being discerning in relation to information gluts or novel concentrations and circulations of power — cannot and do not defend themselves in terms of student desire or demand, economic necessity or benefit, or cost efficiencies within the university.

Reflecting how incontestable this economistic understanding of higher education has become, public opinion regarding education as a means for future economic prosperity remains strong. There is also scant evidence to suggest that Americans’ collective expressions of meritocratic ideology — or the idea that one’s hard work is directly responsible for their material well-being — have waned in any significant way. For these reasons, Biden will likely not cancel student debt absent mass collective action that leaves him with little political recourse.

So how might those who are committed to student debt cancellation go about organizing around this issue?

If, as I have suggested, Biden’s reticence is ideologically motivated, then a successful argument would likely need to underscore the history of student debt—or, more specifically, the common-sense notion that education is a private investment.

First, Americans need to understand that the student debt “crisis” is not a failure of individuals but rather the result of decisions made by political elites which made taking out loans the only viable option for students looking to enroll in college. The second, though far more difficult task is rearticulating higher education not in terms of its potential economic payoffs but its social value. In other words, the common-sense assumption that a college degree is, above all else, a form of human capital must be contested.

In “Vocabularies of the Economy,” Doreen Massey describes how part of the reason this neoliberal class offensive has been so efficacious is that corporate and political elites have successfully naturalized language surrounding “the economy”; in turn, naturalizing markets as the only proper way of conducting social affairs and removing them from the realm of political contestation. This process has ultimately rid us of our collective capacity to imagine a different order.

More specifically, she argues that:

The extent to which these ideas, this ideological scaffolding (of neoliberal capitalism), currently infuse the hegemonic common sense is astonishing. The assumption that markets are natural is so deeply rooted in the structure of thought … that even the fact that this is an assumption seems to have been lost to view. This is real hegemony.

However, even more critically is the degree to which terms like “investment” or “growth” have permeated our collective language to describe human behavior. It is now a common-sense idea that we should all be “investing in ourselves,” “growing professionally,” “building our brand,” and so forth — the idea being that we should always be making ourselves marketable to would-be investors (our bosses, job recruiters, internet audiences, etc.), and which a college education becomes a chief means of satisfying this task.

Jettisoned during this process is our capacity to engage in a valuation process that does not adopt monetary grammar as its means of analysis. Accepting these terms means implicitly accepting our existing order as “normal” and, thus, outside the realm of politics. And accepting this “existing vocabulary,” as Massey contends, “is one of the roots of the elite’s ability to maintain the horrible straitjacket we are in.”