Home Coronavirus Coverage Is Canceling Student Debt the Right Approach? – Inside Higher Ed

Is Canceling Student Debt the Right Approach? – Inside Higher Ed

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Canceling student debt has become a cause among progressives. But behind the scenes, they had different views on including it in the stimulus package.

Three Tuesdays ago, in a building on New York University’s campus, Robert Shireman, director of higher education excellence and senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, was supposed to be part of a debate over whether the government should cancel student debt.

Shireman, a skeptic of the idea, was supposed to go up against one of the leading advocates of the idea, Alexis Goldstein, senior policy analyst at the advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform, as part of series of debates sponsored by NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.

It was a simpler time, before social distancing and hospitals overflowing with coronavirus patients. In just the three weeks since, the world has changed. The subject of that night’s purely academic debate would reach the halls of Congress, with stakes much bigger than the bragging rights after a debate.

Dozens of left-of-center advocates and higher education policy experts privately engaged in their own debate over debt cancellation, divided by such questions as whether a policy, in which wealthy college graduates would be among those who’d benefit, was a high priority right now.

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