Before there is any potential wide-scale student loan cancellation, opponents want Biden, the U.S. Department of Education and Congress to understand the full implications of any decision for mass student loan forgiveness. While supporters believe wide-scale student loan forgiveness is a no-brainer, long-over-due policy decision that needs to be enacted yesterday, opponents say student loan cancellation, simply put, is bad public policy. Here are some arguments that opponents of mass student loan forgiveness raise:
Student loans are not as popular as headlines suggest. There are approximately 250 million adult Americans. Of this group, only 45 million people have student loans. That means approximately 80% of adult Americans don’t have student loans, didn’t go to college, or already paid them off. So, any plan to cancel student loans wouldn’t directly benefit most Americans. Instead, student loan cancellation would be targeted at roughly 20% of the adult population.
