Democratic Presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren knows how to get millennials attention by proposing a new plan to do away with student loan debt for almost all Americans!
According to HuffPost, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) released the wide-ranging plan on Monday that aims to fix the U.S. college system by making two-year and four-year public college free. expanding the size and scope of the federal Pell Grant program, and wiping out student loan debt for the vast majority of American borrowers.
“The time for half-measures is over,” Warren, one of many politicians and public figures hoping to secure the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, wrote in a post published Monday on Medium. “My broad cancellation plan is a real solution to our student debt crisis. It helps millions of families and removes a weight that’s holding back our economy.”
Warren went on to argue that the $1.5 trillion outstanding student loan debt is “crushing millions of families and acting as an anchor on our economy.”
“It’s reducing home ownership rates,” she wrote. “It’s leading fewer people to start businesses. It’s forcing students to drop out of school before getting a degree. It’s a problem for all of us.”
In what she described as her “truly transformational” approach, Warren proposes wiping out $50,000 in student loan debt for anyone with a household income below $100,000. For people with student loans and a household income between $100,000 and $250,000, they would also receive student loan relief, while those with household incomes above $250,000 would not be eligible for debt cancellation.
Under Warren’s proposed plan, up to 76 percent of households with student loan debt would receive “total loan forgiveness,” according to an economic analysis of the proposal by academics at Arizona State University, Brandeis University and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
The study notes that the proposal would make 42 million Americans (ninety-five percent) eligible to have at least some of their debt canceled. Not only does the plan greatly benefit millennials and millions of other Americans, but the plan would also particularly benefit black, Latino and lower-income households, as well as households headed by people who never finished college.
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Warren also plans to create a $50 million fund to help historically black colleges and universities and minority-serving institutions. In addition, she will give additional funds to states that substantially improve enrollment and graduation rates for lower-income students and students of color.
She also wants to prohibit “public colleges from considering citizenship status or criminal history in admissions decisions.”
Her plan is to eventually cut for-profit colleges off from federal money. Student debt owned by the government would be canceled automatically after an analysis of borrowers’ income and outstanding debt, Warren said.
Private student loan debt would be “eligible for cancellation” as well, but in those cases, “the federal government will work with borrowers and the holders of this debt to provide relief,” she said.
Warren’s radical plan is estimated to cost a total of $1.25 trillion over 10 years. She claims the cost would be covered by passing a separate plan to annually tax the wealth of households worth more than $50 million.
“We got into this crisis because state governments and the federal government decided that instead of treating higher education like our public school system ― free and accessible to all Americans ― they’d rather cut taxes for billionaires and giant corporations and offload the cost of higher education onto students and their families,” she wrote Monday.
“The student debt crisis is the direct result of this failed experiment,” she added. “It’s time to end that experiment, to clean up the mess it’s caused, and to do better.”
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