Student Debt Relief Provides Little Relief to Those Who Need It
One such parent struggling with the student debt crisis is O, a black single mother from New York. After working tirelessly to send two sons through private grade school-level education, she must now work to foot the bill of college education for her youngest.
“As a single parent who is trying my best…I recognize that if he graduates with the amount of debt that higher education causes, he will never [get ahead]”.
This is particularly upsetting for O due to what she defines as her own personal American Dream, where as a parent, you’re “able to set your kids up so they get a better start out the gate.” The idea of generational wealth is a long-standing one in American culture, and is a driving force behind all of the work she does for her family.
While her situation isn’t uncommon, not everyone faces the same societal obstacles. O’s white next-door neighbors, for example, are able to provide their kids with credit cards, newer cars, and no debt out of school despite being, as she puts it, “barely lower-middle class folks” themselves.
The “Biden-Harris Student Debt Relief Plan” aims to lighten the load on families like O’s, by forgiving some outstanding student loans without need for repayment. The current version of the plan states that individuals with an income less than $125,000 a year (or households with less than $200,000) can receive up to $10,000 in loan forgiveness, or $20,000 if they were a Pell grant recipient.
However, this level of forgiveness for O is “only a drop in the bucket”, and helps illuminate just how insurmountable some obstacles in her path to her American Dream can truly be. There’s not enough that can be said about the effects on one’s morale of being given a break, just to see that the break in question won’t actually affect one’s position in the grand scheme of things, and O’s student debt crisis is a perfect example of that.
O is…
- 56 Years-Old
- Female, Cisgender
- Black
- Middle Class
- Heterosexual