America's Student Loans Were Never Going to Be Repaid

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

63% : We found that counterintuitively, the repayment pause was the best thing that ever happened to help student loans get repaid.
50% : In recent years, many Americans with student loans weren't making enough money to pay even the accumulating interest on their debt, let alone make progress on the principal.
49% : This situation is the fruit of a tacit agreement among state legislatures, college administrators and the federal government dating back to the 1970s: defund public colleges and universities and shift them to a tuition-based revenue model, with the federal government backstopping the system with student debt so that more students can continue to obtain more expensive education.
46% : This odd structure -- in which federal funding comes in the form of student loans that won't ever be repaid, as opposed to direct funding of colleges and universities -- lets school administrators off the regulatory hook.
45% : But student loan repayment had been dwindling for at least a decade before the pause.
44% : It's increasingly the case that people who were always going to have low earnings no matter their educational attainment are also overloaded with student debt -- think of underpaid teachers who acquired expensive master's degrees for only a modest pay increase.
43% : In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, the federal government stopped requiring regular payments of student loan debt -- a pause that has lasted more than three years.
39% : In the meantime, while the administration and the courts wrangle over the executive branch's ability to waive student debt under existing law, student debtors feel forced to downsize their life plans.
33% : But it's more comfortable and politically convenient to continue to fight the culture war over higher education than to confront the facts about the causes and consequences of this ugly mountain of student debt.

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