Stumbled upon the waning television moments of the Notre Dame-Michigan football game over the weekend and got a depressing reminder that some of us do not necessarily embrace the late Keith Jackson’s “color and pageantry of college football” as we once did.
Nothing against the fine institutions involved in Michigan 45, Notre Dame 14, but as the cameras swept the largest college football stadium in America, I thought not about the spectacle that drew out some 107,000 people into a soggy night in Ann Arbor, Mich., but something more along the lines of, “This may be the largest human representation of student loan debt in one place in American history.”
I wished Betsy DeVos had been there for the ceremonial coin flip, but I missed that part.
Young Americans (and now middle-age Americans) are staggering beneath some $1.5 trillion in student loan debt, according to most estimates, and though Michigan and Notre Dame grads are likely in a better situation than most, the Somehow Still Secretary of Education, Ms. DeVos, keeps hitting them in the back with a folding chair as though she were a common heel on a weekly pro wrestling show.
Held in contempt last week by Federal Judge Sallie Kim, Ms. DeVos will no doubt laugh off the $100,000 the Department of Education will have to pay as punishment for continuing to collect loan payments from students the courts have already determined were ripped off by for-profit colleges. I guess it wasn’t enough that they’d been flim-flammed by “colleges” that touted ridiculously inflated job-placement numbers, so the government just went ahead and garnished their wages as well. I mean those who have wages.
Those students thus took a wallop to their credit ratings while the Department of Education, according to Judge Kim’s contempt ruling, failed to comply with the injunction to knock it off, while offering no explanation for its shameful intransigence.
In keeping with the Trump Administration’s colossal disdain for the law – the what now? – this story only gets worse under further scrutiny. There is a law – a what now? – enacted in 2007 under George W. Bush, widely considered a Republican, called the College Cost Reduction and Access Act (I’ll pause until you stop laughing), which umbrellas something called the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program.
Under this program, someone working in government or in public service or teaching or social work could have their loan liability drastically reduced or forgiven by staying in those jobs for 10 years. Forgiveness, then, was expected to begin in 2017, but the initial analyses of how the program has delivered for its participants are pretty horrifying.
When the Government Accountability Office got around to putting the numbers in a report released in September, 661 people who’d applied for relief under the program were approved, while 53,523 were rejected.
Ninety-nine percent of the people in the program were denied its benefits for reasons ranging from incorrect forms to having the wrong kinds of student loans to having the wrong repayment plan to working in a job that didn’t qualify for forgiveness. So tens of thousands of young Americans planned their financial lives and delayed their professional futures – often in more lucrative fields – to get loan forgiveness from a government program that the government now denies them.
There’s a line for this from “Animal House.” Recast politely, it’s Otter telling Flounder, “Ya screwed up; ya trusted us!”
“Instead of helping the millions of Americans owed debt relief under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, DeVos has hurt and pauperized them,” said a statement from Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “And instead of working with lawmakers to improve the program that millions of teachers, firefighters, nurses and first responders deserve, DeVos has vandalized it.”
So the AFT is rightly suing, and the Department of Education is reflexively slow-walking the release of materials relative to the suit or stonewalling altogether, because it’s part of what President Donald Trump has identified preposterously as “the most transparent administration in our history.”
Some 45 million people have student loans, almost one of every six Americans. If you thought Mr. Trump’s tax cut goosed the economy, imagine what student loan forgiveness could do. Unlike the tax cut, it would primarily benefit lower and middle class families, and not just a little.
You can disagree with the practicality of total forgiveness as outlined by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has a $1.6 trillion plan for that, but he’s right when he says, “You are not truly free when you cannot pursue your dream of becoming a teacher, environmentalist, journalist or nurse because you cannot make enough money to cover your monthly student loan payments.”
At the big televised football games, students used to hold up signs saying, “Mom and Dad, send money!” So now Besty DeVos has her own sign: “Send money forever! No relief in sight!”
Gene Collier: gcollier@post-gazette.com and Twitter @genecollier.
First Published: October 29, 2019, 10:00 a.m.
