An idea for student-loan forgiveness perfectly suited to the times. – The Chronicle of Higher Education
Carlo Salerno is an education economist known to many in higher-ed wonk world for arguments that challenge conventional wisdom. He’s fun to argue with. But it’s hard to find any real beef with his latest idea, which he proposes as a complement to the federal Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. Salerno says it’s time for a program that could “trade small amounts of federal student-loan forgiveness for small amounts of public service that provide clear social value.”
I’ve been intrigued by this idea ever since Salerno first laid it out in a 10-part Twitter thread in June. This week he outlined it more fully (but still succinctly) in this post on Medium. I hope the concept gets some traction. It could help fix two big societal problems we face right now because of the pandemic: financially distressed borrowers could use some debt relief, and cash-strapped communities are dealing with pressing public needs.
What’s more, this could have some political appeal. The approach presents an alternative to the expansive loan-forgiveness plan that some Democrats are now pushing — a proposal that, as Salerno noted, many critics consider “an unfair windfall for the tens of millions of Americans with a college degree and the means to pay it back.”