Student loan borrowers looking for promising signs that their debt will be forgiven have come up short of late.
President Joe Biden didn’t include any debt cancellation in his budget request to Congress. Loan forgiveness was also absent from the president’s plans to rebuild the country’s infrastructure and his agenda to deliver relief to middle-class families, which included a national paid leave policy and subsidized child care.
Recent remarks by the president haven’t been too encouraging, either. In an interview with columnist David Brooks of The New York Times in May, Biden said: “The idea that you go to Penn and you’re paying a total of 70,000 bucks a year and the public should pay for that? I don’t agree.” And at a CNN town hall in February, Biden said that it didn’t make sense to cancel the loans “for people who have gone to Harvard and Yale and Penn.”
Still, experts say that student debt forgiveness remains on the table.
“There is certainly a chance,” said Andre M. Perry, senior fellow with the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program.
“Schumer and Warren make a formidable pair,” he added, referring to Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer, of New York, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. “In addition, civil rights groups like the NAACP are mobilizing.”