Eliminating All Student Debt Isn’t Progressive

Democrats won’t be able to do much policymaking over the next two years, because of President Trump and the Republican Senate. But they can still use their House majority to do more than investigate Trump. Democrats can hold hearings and pass bills that make clear their party’s vision for 2020 and beyond. They can figure out which ideas have the potential both to improve people’s lives and to win over voters.

One idea that’s started making the rounds is the elimination of all student debt. Major publications have published columns promoting the idea. Almost 20 House Democrats have signed on to a bill — written by Jared Polis, Colorado’s governor-elect — that would cancel all debt. It’s also a priority for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the high-profile incoming House member from the Bronx.

The allure is clear enough. Americans now hold about $1.4 trillion in student debt. Eliminating it seems like the kind of bold, progressive idea that Democrats should embrace.

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But it’s actually a bad idea. It is the sort of proposal — alluring but counterproductive — that Democrats should avoid as they build an agenda.

The fatal flaw of universal student-debt cancellation is that it’s not, in fact, progressive. It mostly benefits the upper middle class. “Education debt,” as Sandy Baum and Victoria Lee of the Urban Institute have written, “is disproportionately concentrated among the well-off.” The highest-earning quarter of the population holds more than a third of all student debt, while the lowest-earning quarter holds only 12 percent, according to Baum and Lee. Which means that universal student debt cancellation would be a giant welfare program for the bourgeoisie.