Should Biden Give Up on Student Loan Debt?

After a three-year hiatus during the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans will have to begin repaying their student-loan debt this month. And after the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in June to strike down President Biden’s student-loan forgiveness program, mass relief probably won’t come anytime soon. Biden has adopted other, narrower programs, and may try to salvage a Plan B for broader forgiveness. But in the meantime, millions of Americans are financially unprepared to start making payments again, and the Department of Education is stuck in a logistical quagmire, trying to restart a repayment system that wasn’t designed to be paused. What should Biden do in the face of a right-wing Supreme Court that seems uninterested in changing its views? Or about the larger, systemic problems that caused a student-debt crisis in the first place? Even in an ideal world of free or affordable public universities, what impact would right-wing ideology have on curriculum? Host Brian Beutler discusses all of these questions and others with Kevin Carey, vice president for Education Policy and knowledge management at New America, where he directs the Education Policy program.