Some items end up on the agenda because a towering majority of Americans demand change—the most obvious recent example is rising gas prices. Student debt feels different. After all, just 13 percent of the country carries federal student debt. Gallup frequently asks Americans what they believe is the most important problem facing the country today. According to the Gallup analyst Justin McCarthy, the pollster is unable “to report the percentage of Americans who have mentioned student debt or student debt cancellation because it hasn’t garnered enough mentions to do so.” In 2022 so far, he told me via email, Gallup has conducted four polls on the question and “just one respondent mentioned this as the most important problem facing the nation.”
Why, then, is student-debt cancellation having such a moment in the national political conversation? . . .
Reason five: The power of college graduates
According to Catalist data, roughly 43 percent of the 2020 Biden electorate graduated from a four-year college or university. Compare that with 2012, when, according to Pew, just 36 percent of registered Democrats had completed a four-year degree or more. Given that trend, student-loan forgiveness may seem like the classic tale of a political party transferring a valuable benefit to a crucial constituency.
Although college-educated voters are an important segment of the Democratic Party, no one identity group is completely dominant. The party has long been a coalitional organization stitched together loosely and lacking a clear ideological core. Daniel Schlozman, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, explained a coalitional shift within the party in recent years. “Democrats are becoming more consistently liberal in a variety of ways, and they’re becoming more upper-middle-class all at once,” he told me. “And that creates some awkwardness.”
Awkward indeed that so much energy has been spent on a policy proposal that would affect just 13 percent of the population, and that would send the most dollars to high-income earners and those with graduate degrees. The fervor with which student-loan advocates argue that these policies are in fact racially and economically progressive may be an attempt to resolve the awkwardness that Schlozman describes—advocates of debt cancellation are trying to build a coherent narrative for why a diverse coalition, many of whom have never attended college, should be in favor of forgiveness.
College-educated voters are not just dominant within the Democratic Party; they also dominate the media and, naturally, academia—two institutions that have significant power over what issues are brought to the fore.
It benefits the ins at the expense of the outs for doctors and professors to have their loans paid off by truck drivers and manicurists.