Cancel Student Debt: Braxton Brewington
March 28th, 2024
“Student debt shouldn't function as a poverty tax or a time tax.”
Braxton Brewington is the Press Secretary of the Debt Collective. We discuss the origins of the Debt Collective in the Rolling Jubilee and its history in canceling student debt. Their example is a powerful model for canceling student debt, which continues to be important for all Americans in this election cycle and beyond.
Education is a public good, yet the cost of college over the past couple of decades has risen eight times faster than the average wages. The average student debt is $30,000-$35,000. Two-thirds of student debt is owed by women, and a large number of student loan borrowers don't have a college degree. This means that they are paying down student debt on non-college degree wages. The Debt Collective started out as the Rolling Jubilee, which canceled tens of millions of dollars of debt and gave instant relief to borrowers. Canceling student debt creates millions of jobs, boosts the economy, and advances racial and gender justice. Although the Biden administration has canceled billions in student debt, it is only making a small dent in over $1.7 trillion worth of student loans.
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Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Braxton Brewington
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producer: Zack Travis
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Braxton Brewington Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:00] Thanks to Shopify for supporting Future Hindsight. Shopify is a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs like us the resources once reserved for big business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/hopeful. All lowercase.
Mila Atmos: [00:00:24] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos.
It's 2024 and the future of America is in your hands. Democracy is not a spectator sport. So we're here to bring you an independent perspective about the election this year and empower you to change the status quo.
The promise of student debt relief was a big part of the equation in the 2020 presidential election, and the prospect of a future with reduced debt turned out a lot of voters. That's no surprise, of course, because over 43 million Americans have student debt as of the fall of 2023. The total student debt burden is more than $1.74 trillion, a staggering number that is more than South Korea's GDP in the same year. And if the debt were to make up the GDP of its own country, it would rank 13th in the world. Of course, the tale of student debt cancellation has had many ups and downs since 2020, and today we'll discuss why canceling student debt continues to be important for all Americans and what's possible in this election cycle. Our guest today is Braxton Brewington. He's the press secretary of the Debt Collective and a graduate student in sociology at UNC Chapel Hill.
Welcome, Braxton. Thank you so much for joining us.
Braxton Brewington: [00:02:01] It's great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.
Mila Atmos: [00:02:04] So I just mentioned in the intro, the magnitude of total student debt is approximately $1.74 trillion, with over 43 million student debtors. Those are whopping numbers. So I think it would be super helpful for the listener to get a lay of the land before we dive deeper. How is it so large? How do we get here?
Braxton Brewington: [00:02:27] Yeah, I actually hadn't heard that GDP stat before and I'm just in awe sitting here thinking about it. But I think about these numbers every day. What's so wild about $1.7 close to $2 trillion is that it's mostly accumulated really in the past couple of decades. Even in the 90s, federal student debt was almost too small to count. And so the cost of college over the past couple of decades has risen exponentially, and it's risen eight times faster than the average wages. And so basically, what's happening is people are not making enough money to keep up with the cost of college. And so they're having to borrow federal dollars in order to attend. That means the average student loan balance is about $30 or $35,000. Of course, this balance is segmented along racial and gender lines, so women hold about two thirds of student debt. For Black Americans, they hold, on average, about $50,000 worth of student loan debt. If you want to be a teacher, a social worker, or a nurse, you know these types of occupations that require a master's degree. You have to go to graduate school, right? And so that is extra money on top of just a bachelor's degree. And additionally, there's a chunk of this population, 40% of people who hold student debt who don't actually have their diploma. And so they went into college, and for whatever reason, they weren't actually able to finish their degree. And so a huge chunk of student loan borrowers don't actually have a college degree. And so they're paying college debt on high school diploma income. Across the United States, nearly 50 million Americans, young and old, increasingly diverse, as diverse as the working class who hold this debt. And it's crushing families. I mean, people are not able to purchase a home, start a family, start a small business. People have taken very drastic measures to take on second or third job. Some people are living out of their cars or continuing to live with their parents well into their 40s, so that they can work to pay off the student loan debt. So this is a huge crisis and it's keeping families down. And that's part of why there's such a big call to cancel it or to deliver some relief to people.
Mila Atmos: [00:04:52] Well, thanks for the context that student debt has grown eight times since the 90s; and that in the 90s, it really was not a significant part of the economy that people just would safely ignore it. And of course, to highlight that education has become so much more expensive that people really have to go into debt in order to go to college. Actually, I had a colleague a long time ago now when I just first got out of college, and she showed me her invoice to go to a state college, one of the SUNY colleges at the time. She was older than I am, and it was something like $2,300.
And I thought, "what?" I think people just forget that really is very different and you mentioned that the average debt is $35,000. But, you know, if you go to a private institution nowadays, it's closer to $60,000 per year in tuition, you know. So if you're in college today, your debt's probably going to be closer to $100,000. And plus the interest and all this, I really want to get into the nitty gritty of student debt cancellation. But before we talk about the numbers, the promises, the hearings, the Supreme Court case, tell us about the founding of the Debt Collective. I know that it started out as Strike Debt, and I think it's important to understand how you think about debt at the Debt Collective. Who controls the debt and how does the debt control the borrowers?
Braxton Brewington: [00:06:14] That's a great question. The Debt Collective, in some ways is important to talk about our founding as the Rolling Jubilee. So we're currently called the Debt Collective. We used to go by the name Strike Debt, but before that we were the Rolling Jubilee. So, you know, the Debt Collective formed out of Occupy Wall Street where people looked around and said, what do we have in common? It's actually these debts that we hold to hospitals, to the federal government for student debt, to credit card companies, to bail bonds, etc.. And how can we use that debt as leverage against a system that runs on finance capitalism that preys on the indigent and the poor, that uses interest as a way to accumulate cash for creditors? So one of the first things we did was actually engage in the secondary market in the way that shady debt collectors do, where they buy and sell debt for pennies on the dollar on this secondary market. You know, when you go to a hospital and you end up with a bill and then years later someone's calling you for it, it's some other debt collector, right, who the hospital then sold the debt to. And so the Debt Collective thought, well, what if we could buy some debt and then erase it for people? And so we actually got our start as the Rolling Jubilee by canceling tens of millions of dollars of debt. And that was life changing. People got relief instantly. Just to put things on the scale, a dollar worth of debt you can really buy for one, 2 or 3 pennies. And so we were able to cancel tens of millions of dollars worth of debt for people. But that's just not sustainable. I mean, the debt is just going to keep building. And the point is that people can't afford what should be public goods at the point of entry. And so then we thought, well, we need to organize around this issue. We actually need to, as debtors come together and unionize. Right. That doesn't really exist. You know, people do that at their workplace. But how do debtors do that? How do we unionize against a creditor? And so that's when we started the Debt Collective to say, how can we create a union of people where our debt is leveraged
against a failed system? I think we're in large part known for our work on higher education and student debt in particular, because the debt is just so high. It's the second largest household debt type after mortgages. And the crisis is rising so exponentially. And so we actually got our start with for-profit colleges where Black women, mothers, veterans, people who maybe had mental health challenges really were being preyed on by these predatory for-profit colleges. And they were being promised they would have a degree that would help them in the labor market. And that wasn't true. They were fraudulent. And so the Debt Collective discovered this little known line in the Higher Education Act of 1965, which said, if you were taken advantage of by a college, you were entitled to debt relief. Well, no one had ever invoked that legal authority before. I mean, before 2013, '12, '14, there was no student debt relief for these individuals, even though that law was on the books for a while. This is a legal authority that is very real. The Department of Education should simply use it. Right? There's people who went to Corinthian College, Art Institute, all of these predatory big chain colleges, and we were saying, we need to cancel this debt, but there was no bureaucratic way of going about doing that. There wasn't a form, there wasn't a number to call. Right. There's no button to click on the Department of Education website. And so we created our own application based on our legal experts and the information that was available to us. We thought, this is the type of information the Department of Education should know if someone wanted to apply for relief. So we created our own application. Tens of thousands of people filled it out. We gave them to the Department of Education and said, you need to process these. After a lot of paperwork and back and forth and a tumultuous Trump administration, billions of dollars worth of debt has been canceled because of this legal authority that we invoked. And so I think when people hear numbers of how has the Biden administration been able to cancel X amount of dollars for X amount of people? A lot of that is due to people in this for-profit space that the Debt Collective worked to really highlight this tool, which is called borrower defense. Now it's not our tool anymore. You can go to the Department of Education and fill out their application, which is sort of a copy and paste version of ours. And then we started looking at more authorities and we're like, well, why can't we just cancel debt for anyone. Right? Why does it have to be that you were defrauded by some predatory college? What if you just fell on hard times, or the cost of college is just going up too high. It seems like Congress is failing to act. Can the president step in with this legal authority? And so now that's sort of where we are. But a lot of what we got our
start was with for-profit colleges. And that's been revolutionary for people who have gotten relief.
Mila Atmos: [00:11:34] Yeah. That's amazing. Congratulations. I really think people don't connect those two dots. That predatory for-profit colleges have taken advantage of former students. In some cases, they didn't even get a diploma. Or if they wanted to go to another school to pick up after they had been shut down, they couldn't because the credits didn't count. So really, they were in debt essentially for nothing. It's like they lit money on fire because, you know, they spent not only the money, but also the time, you know, that they put in to go to class and do homework and all of these things. I mean, it just makes you want to weep. But tell us a little bit more also about the debt that you bought on the secondary market, because I think for people that's also confusing. What kind of debt did you buy? Because that's not federal debt. Correct? And what kind of relief are you offering there? And I know that you just did that in November with Morehouse College. So maybe that's a great example for you to elucidate how this works.
Braxton Brewington: [00:12:31] Yeah, I think that's a great example. Late in 2023, we bought some student debt from Morehouse College, which is a small but prominent HBCU in Atlanta, Georgia. And so basically what happened is Morehouse College took all of the debt that they had in collections. So this is debt that people owed the university. Maybe this is $25 or $45 for a parking ticket. Maybe this is $2,000 for tuition that they weren't able to finish paying, sometimes up to in the $30,000 range. They took all of this debt that they had in collections for about 3,000 people who still owed the university. They transferred it to the Debt Collective and the Rolling Jubilee. So now we own the debt, but instead of collecting on it, we canceled it. And so we sent letters to all of these people saying the Debt Collective has eliminated this debt. This is a no strings attached gift. This is a form of mutual aid. You know, maybe consider joining the Debt Collective. If you've got other debt types, we'd love to organize around somehow finding a way to getting those canceled because we can't cancel all of the debt in the world. I believe about $125,000 is what we paid for about $10 million worth of debt. So this is $10 million that vanished in an instant. And we did this same thing for a small college in Texas, another college in North Carolina. We've done this for medical debt and criminal legal debt in Florida and in Mississippi. Again, like I said, we did this back in 2012, but we actually put the Rolling Jubilee in hibernation, and we pulled it back out after the
wake of Covid because of the economic crisis that people were in. And so only recently have we actually started back up canceling all of this debt for people with the small dollar or large dollar donations that were able to raise to help go towards canceling this debt. But ultimately, we've just got to organize around this debt because there's trillions of it, right? We're not going to be able to buy all of that. And even if someone were to, it would just pop back up in the next couple of years. So the Rolling Jubilee, it's been a really interesting way to shine a light on how the secondary debt market works. I mean, you quite literally get spreadsheets of portfolios of debt, which is, you know, your name, maybe a phone number, maybe an email, maybe an address. And presumably this is what debt collectors are going through when they call you, or maybe knock on your door, or maybe go to court and try to sue you or threaten you with jail time. This really shady market is something that we sort of tapped into. It's very scary. I do not like it, don't want any parts of it. But when we're able to help people, it's really great. And that experience, I think, is in part what gives us the abolitionist vision to demand debt relief, because we have the experience of purchasing debt for a very small amount and canceling it. And so we're sort of saying, hey, we're a group of activists, you know, is there any way that the state of Washington, the state of New York, the federal government can chime in here and start to cancel loads of debts at a time, and we think they can.
Mila Atmos: [00:15:50] Yeah. Well, I feel like we need to share with the listener in case they don't know how a debt collector works, is they buy these, they buy the debt with pennies on the dollar, and then they try to collect as much money as possible from these spreadsheets by calling everybody or reaching out to these people and trying to collect as many dollars as possible, and whatever difference they make between what they paid for it and what they collect is their profit. And of course, it's extremely shady. So it's really fantastic that you've done this Rolling Jubilee.
Mila Atmos: [00:16:19] We are going to take a quick break to thank our sponsor, Shopify, and we'll continue with Braxton in just a moment.
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Mila Atmos: [00:19:06] And now let's return to my conversation with Braxton Brewington. I have a question about, you know, just canceling this debt, buying this debt in the secondary, and the forbearance during the Covid years because you brought the Jubilee back out after the Covid years, right, because when the forbearance stopped, of course, people had to pay again. And I kind of feel like we had this real life experiment with what happens when student debt payments are stopped. And for the clarification for the listener, forbearance was one of the emergency pandemic measures under
Trump. It was an interest free student loan payment pause. I'm curious what your takeaways have been in the movement of what happened during the pause, like the economy kept on going, you know, but really, what's your takeaway and how is it informing your action going forward?
Braxton Brewington: [00:20:08] The pandemic changed so much, not only morally and in terms of human relations. But the economy, we saw so many things happen that so many people would have agreed was not possible before that. And one of that being the pause on federal student loan payments, which started on, I believe, March 13th of 2020 and lasted over three years, almost four years. For the first time ever, there was a pause on student debt, which saved families $5 billion a month. So every month, billions of dollars were just being kept in people's pockets and not given to the Department of Education. And I think it really reconstructed how people think about the purpose of student loan debt. I mean, the federal government's lights stayed on, right? The sky didn't fall. In fact, the reverse happened. People were for the first time able to afford child care. I mean, of course, this is combined with an extended child tax credit, unemployment insurance. There was a bevy of financial incentives for people to be able to stay afloat for an amount of time. Most of those pandemic era protections, rent protections, have gone away. But the pause on student loan arguably stayed the longest, and that meant that people were able to keep an average of $400 in their pocket and not go to the Department of Education, and that changed a lot for people. And, you know, not only was there a pause. Each month of a $0 payment still allowed for people to qualify for a month worth of, say, public service loan forgiveness or a month credit towards an income-driven repayment plan. So, for example, say you were a teacher, right? And you've been a teacher for seven years in 2020, a couple of years go by, you basically got three years to get to your ten-year plan. And so lots of people, hundreds of thousands of people were able to get all of their debt cancelled once they hit that ten year mark during the pause. And so basically kind of got scot free with a couple of years worth of debt relief. So not only did people get to keep money in their pocket, some people, their timeline got cut short and they had to pay less over time than maybe they originally thought they had to do. I can't overstate how impactful the pause was. We heard from so many people who said, for the first time in years, I've been able to go to the dentist and get my teeth fixed. People who started to have children, people who started a small business, people who purchased a home. A lot of people simply paid down other debts that they had. Right. I think I heard a stat about 30% of stimulus
checks went to paying down debt. I mean, that's just the financial incentive. So many people just said for the first time, I have breathing room. This debt is a cloud that just hangs over my every financial move, whether I, at the end of the week, go out and have a drink with a friend from a stressful week is just something I hadn't really considered being able to do. Let alone, you know, the the big things like living in a home. God forbid. Now that that pause is gone, we're seeing a return to the version of the student debt crisis that we had in 2019 and prior to that, which is people who are having to make super tough decisions. Do I get cancer treatments or do I pay my student loans? Do I move back into my parent's house at age 45? You know, we were thinking about having kids. Maybe not. This is such a gendered conversation. I mean, we've heard from a lot of women who the payment pause allowed them to leave an abusive or scary relationship because the financial power that they sort of regained from having to pause. So many facets of life changed both when there was a pause and now that the pause has expired, which is really doubles down on why we've been calling for relief. Because we basically had a pause, but no relief. And that's not the same for other sectors of the economy, say business owners who got PPP loans canceled. Right. And who are able to maybe keep their employees afloat or even the rich. Certain banks got big bailouts, right, just a couple years ago. And so while the pause was influential, there wasn't actually any relief. There was relief promised. And then we can talk about the courts, but people didn't actually get their relief. And so in some ways, some people were able to slip through the cracks and it really helped them. But for a lot of people now, the 2019 era crisis of student debt has just started over again.
Mila Atmos: [00:24:48] Yeah, well, let's talk about the case before the Supreme Court, because now that we know -- I think to me this was the biggest surprise -- now that we know that the president can, in fact, basically decide forbearance all by himself, or the administration can administer this and execute it, decide to do this. I was a little bit surprised that the Biden administration got caught up with a case in front of the Supreme Court, and that the court decided that it was unconstitutional under the HEROES Act. And I kind of feel like it would be helpful to understand what is the HEROES act and why was that applied, as opposed to, which I know something that you have been advocating for for a long time, the Higher Education Act of 1965, like, how did the Biden administration get tangled up in a court case and of all things, with the HEROES Act?
Braxton Brewington: [00:25:43] Yeah. So the Biden administration announced student debt relief. And the legal authority that they cited for this relief was the HEROES act, which basically gave the Department of Education and the president authority to cancel student debt in the wake of an emergency. And so Covid 19 was that emergency. There's almost unanimous agreement among folks in the legal field that this HEROES Act is on strong legal footing. And yet the Supreme Court said, no, you cannot cancel student debt using the HEROES authority. It's important to understand the Supreme Court didn't say the Biden administration can never cancel student debt in any situation whatsoever, right? The debt always has to stick with people forever. That's not what they said. They said you can't use the HEROES act. And so what the Biden administration is doing now and what we've been calling on them to do, you know, for quite some time now is use a different legal authority, which is the Higher Education Act of 1965, which in some senses is even more broad maybe than the HEROES authority, which says the Department of Education can cancel student debt because it's federally owned by the government. Right. So this makes sort of pretty basic sense. The federal government can collect on debt that they own because it's the debt that they own. And they can say, we're not going to collect on the debt we owned because we own it. Right. If I give you $5 to borrow, I could say, can you please give it back? Or I could say, you know what? Just just keep it. It's yours. It's, it was my $5. I'm allowed, you know. So the Higher Education Act basically says, hey, the federal government can cancel debt that it owns. And so there's no legal challenges now because we're still in the rulemaking process. And so the White House is still trying to decipher what exactly their proposal is going to be for debt relief. Inevitably, there probably will be challenges mounted on the right. And I think some of the legal arguments that the right made in Biden v Nebraska really are telling to the power of student debt relief. And there was one lawsuit that said this is supposed to be a bad thing. They said if you cancel student debt, it would be racial justice, right? It would help Black and brown Americans. Another lawsuit said that if you cancel student debt, workers are going to have more leverage in the workplace, right? They'll now be able to go work for someone else. There was another lawsuit that really just, you know, said it flat out, which is people are making money off of this. And so those lawsuits don't have anything to do with the HEROES Act. So inevitably some of those might pop back up. But that's where we are in terms of why the Supreme Court said that. I strongly disagree and many people disagree. And I think we could point to plenty of corruption and hypocrisy among the justices there. But that's behind us, and we're now moving towards a second attempt at relief.
Mila Atmos: [00:28:48] Um, you know, I was thinking as we were drafting these questions, that student debt relief is really a question of freedom and these hypothetical court cases that are coming up, really actually, I mean, they're just shocking. What you just said, that really it is about freedom, right? Like one of the ways that everyday Americans are entrapped in a way, is because of this debt. So why is the Biden administration not moving faster? Because it seems like they could just do this. And why are they still fiddling with rulemaking or whatever? And I don't know if you know the answer to this because you don't work for the Biden administration. But it seems to me from the outside reading up on this that it's just another ploy to buy time and then in the end, not do very much. Or am I misinterpreting what I have learned so far?
Braxton Brewington: [00:29:38] Not a misinterpretation at all. That was a big part of our frustration with the implementation of the first round. So, you know, we are not oblivious to the politicized nature of our Supreme Court. And so part of our demand, when we were pushing for a student debt relief in that first round, was not just to cancel as much debt as possible, but to administer it as fast as possible. So, you know, we were really saying, if this comes to the court, right, we want the debt to have been canceled, people's accounts to be zeroed out, before it can even get to the court. Right. Maybe the court slaps the Biden administration on the wrist and says, we didn't think you were allowed to do that, but at least people's debts would be canceled. They moved so slow. I mean, the amount of time between Biden's announcement and when there was an injunction, which means the court said, hey, you need to stop trying to implement this policy was 50 days. In those 50 days, the Biden administration is getting an application up and running. They are trying to troubleshoot a beta website, and we're like, could you have thought of those things before? And so we can implement this really quickly. And so I do think there is a really fair point to say, is the Biden administration's heart really in it? Are they really putting the skin in the game? Right? I mean, I think people have made similar claims about giving money towards military operations or the speed in which we bailed out banks have all happened quite instantly. There's no 50 day waiting period of we're going to bail out a bank in 50 days, get back to us. We're hoping that the Biden administration will learn from their mistakes and this next go around and implement relief immediately. Right. People's accounts should be zeroed out. People should wake up and see that their account balances have changed, rather than hearing it on the news or hearing it from a Biden administration
announcement, which really just gives people time to mount court challenges. I mean, if the court goes as far as to say we want to reimpose debt, which many people have said is deeply unconstitutional and akin to slavery. Something as dramatic as like, you can't just impose debt on people. If the Supreme Court is going to truly be the worst of the worst actor, let them do that. But the Biden administration needs to go as hard as they can, right? And then they can maybe point at the Supreme Court if they're end up being the bad guys. But until then, there's definitely more fervor in which the Biden administration needs to move, in terms of administering debt relief. And we've seen that type of effort on other issues that they definitely, truly care about. I will say the tide has turned a lot. I mean, I'm old enough to remember 2020 where Joe Biden said, I'm not going to cancel student debt, you know, that's... or I'm just going to do this amount for these people. Student debt relief is only going to help the wealthy. Or, you know, I mean, some of those talking points have done a complete 180 if you look at the Biden administration talking points that they're touting, one of it is the millions of people who have gotten debt relief. So their view on student debt relief has definitely changed. But I think that change is part of the indicator as to why they moved with such a slow pace this first time, and hopefully they learn from the mistakes.
Mila Atmos: [00:32:57] Yes, hopefully they'll learn from their mistakes because, you know, the election is just in a few months from now. And I think this would turn out a lot of Americans, as it did last time. And I think this is a promise that I believe that Biden administration cannot afford to have left unfulfilled. I actually I think this, among other issues, would sink his re-election bid. That's my personal opinion. But in any case... So we're talking about student debt. And I'd like you to make the case about why student debt cancellation benefits all Americans and why we should all support it, even those who complain it's unfair.
Braxton Brewington: [00:33:41] Yeah. So this is a great question, because your answer really depends on what you truly think about student debt has implications for how you go about handling it. And so if you think student debt is unjust, if you think that college should be a public good, if you think that college should be free. And it used to be, right. We used to have a nation where college was free. It was largely for white men. And then the Reagan administration came, and women and Black and Hispanic folks wanted to go to college. And mysteriously, coincidentally, the price went up. But if you believe in free college, if you believe in a world in which people can learn not just to
enter the workplace, but for the sake of learning, right? Which is what we do in K through 12. You don't have to pay money to go to K through 12. It's just a public good. Then you would believe in full student debt cancellation and transitioning to free college. I've had this conversation so many times with people I know and you know, maybe people online who are like, "well, college shouldn't be free because it's a good that we should pay for." I don't know. I guess if you pay for it, that makes the good worth it or something like that. A lot of these arguments rely on the idea of scarcity that there's not enough to go around. And so if there wasn't enough to go around, I would kind of get those arguments. But there is! The federal government can fund college. And so we should make it free. And, you know, there was a time 100 years ago, maybe a little more than that, where high school used to cost money. High school wasn't always free for everyone in the United States. And then we learned to compete globally and to make sure people get the education they need to succeed in the world and make good decisions and have the tools of knowledge available to them, that we should just make high school publicly available and free. That's something we all benefit from. And so why should that stop at college? Right. So we're we're saying pre-K to to PhD, college really should be free. And I think people sometimes hear the word free and think mandatory. And so some people are like, well, I want to be an electrician. Or what about people who want to take on certain trades, uh, vocational school. And some of that actually does cost money. And we're saying that that shouldn't, either. But I think our answer to that is "exactly right. People should have the choice to make on their own." If people want to pursue a type of career that requires a bachelor's degree or a master's degree, they should be able to do that. And if that's not something they want to do, then they don't have to do that. But education is a public good. And so if you believe that, then you probably quickly get to student debt relief. I mean, on top of that, it's just good for the economy, right? Canceling student debt creates millions of jobs. It boosts the economy. It advances racial and gender justice. We can look at payments having been paused for the past couple of years. Your taxes didn't go up because student debt payments were paused. It creates more businesses, right? It frees people up in your community. And so there's a ton of benefits to, you know, student debt being canceled and shifting towards college, being free. But education really is a public good. I mean, this exists in other countries, and the sky hasn't fallen. And other nations where there is free college and we can do the same for sure.
Mila Atmos: [00:37:03] Well, I agree that education is a public good, and I haven't thought about whether college should be free. But we also know from this conversation that a lot of the old debt for sure is only worth pennies on the dollar. So how much of that really needs to be collected back? And I think that's a real question. Instead of collecting back the dollars, whether we shouldn't allow people to have the freedom to use those funds to actually spend on their own lives and invigorate the economy, to your point. I always ask our guests how we can enhance our civic action toolkit. So what are two things an everyday person can do to relieve their own student debt, or to support their movement to eliminate it?
Braxton Brewington: [00:37:47] I'm going to shamelessly say I think people should join the Debt Collective. There were millions of people who were at these for-profit schools, and if they had gone about trying to get relief on an individual way, they might not have gotten it. And so it was only people banding together to demand relief at the same time in a unionized way that actually delivered on that relief. Just to be clear, the union functions like a labor union. So people pay dues. There is a $0 dues option so people can join that way or pay whatever they can. But being in community with people who hold debt actually is the way to organize around debt relief. And so the more folks that join, the more pressure there is, the more collective power that we hold. I think something else people can do, and a lot of what can make debt relief possible, is shifting the moral of how we think about debt. I mean, when people think of debt and this goes back to biblical ages, when people think of debt as something inherently wrong that you fundamentally did wrong, it gives permission for these predatory debt collection practices. It allows conversations like making sure people stay in debt forever to even happen. And so one thing we always do is encourage people to release themselves of the shame and stigma of holding debt, especially for something like federal debt to a college. You probably went to college, you know, you -- person who has student debt -- or know someone with student debt. You probably went to college because you were trying to better yourself. You were trying to learn how to become an engineer. You wanted to learn how to be an artist. You wanted to save lives and become a doctor. Whatever you go to school for, this is a systemic issue, right? If you were wealthy, you would have been able to pay for college up front, but you weren't. And so student debt shouldn't function as a poverty tax or a time tax. And so one thing that we say is we're not asking for debt forgiveness because we don't have anything to be sorry for. We're asking for debt cancellation, debt abolition, debt relief. One thing that
I would encourage people to do is have a conversation with yourself or someone else and start to talk about debt as stigma and start to release that shame. Because once we start to release the shame and the stigma, I think we can actually have a better conversation about seeing the debt for what it is and the value that it really holds, as opposed to, you know, letting it physically or proverbially shackle you in chains of bondage.
Mila Atmos: [00:40:34] Well, I like the theory of change to be in solidarity with each other on the debt and how much more power you have collectively to demand that debt be canceled. And to your point, to say that it should be forgiven is it's actually conceding the frame, right, that being in debt and not being able to pay it is punishable. Like you committed a crime for not being able to pay back debt on getting an education, which is something that is beneficial for you, yourself, of course, by being better educated. But for society in general, I think we should embrace more people to be better educated overall. So my last question is looking into the future. What makes you hopeful?
Braxton Brewington: [00:41:25] There's so many things that make me hopeful, so it's hard to pick one, and remaining hopeful is probably what's gotten us this far. I think one of the things that makes me hopeful is actually a story that just recently happened. Friend and co-worker at the Debt Collective, Elaini Shermer, wrote about this in The New Yorker a couple of months ago. It was a story about a woman named Betty Ann. She's a Black woman in her 90s, I think, the first black woman to go to a law school in New York. And she borrowed, like, $30,000. The debt blew up after default and just accumulating over time. I mean, as recently as last year, it was $300,000. She sold furniture, did everything to try to get this debt down, and just couldn't. I mean, now she's in her 90s because of a union of debtors and some people who are just able to navigate forms and reach out to people in the Department of Education and apply pressure around this specific person. The Department of Education just canceled all of her debt. In some ways, this sounds like one of those feel good stories that like, actually isn't a feel good story. They're like, well, she's in her 90s. Her debt should be canceled. I don't mean it that way. I really mean it in seeing power shift around me, I've literally, by organizing with other people, have been able to see us change people's lives by organizing and by leveraging our own power. And so really working at the Debt Collective has made me very, very hopeful. In addition to that, there's a lot of artists at the Debt Collective, mainly because we were organizing around the Art Institute, and so
there's so many people who have debt from this predatory college who are just phenomenal creatives. And so I think people who have brought art and passion and joy into the movement at every turn, which is why we now have Jubilees where we just go and dance in the street and think about what's going to happen when our debt's cancelled. All of that is what makes me hopeful. So there's a lot going on nowadays, and I'm grateful to have people around me who are remaining hopeful and joyful and jubilant.
Mila Atmos: [00:43:42] Oh that's terrific. That is both hopeful and powerful. And I did read that article, actually, in The New Yorker when it came out. And I just wanted to highlight here again, before we close, that her $30,000 debt became $300,000. And that alone should be reason to cancel student debt. Thank you so much for joining us, Braxton. It was really a pleasure to have you on the show.
Braxton Brewington: [00:44:05] Thank you so much for having me.
Mila Atmos: [00:44:08] Braxton Brewington is the press secretary of the Debt Collective
and a graduate student in sociology at UNC Chapel Hill.
Next week on Future Hindsight, we're joined by Jeffrey Rosen. He's the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, the host of We the People, a weekly podcast of constitutional debate, and a professor of law at the George Washington University Law School.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:44:37] It's impossible to read the founding literature without being struck by how much the founders were on guard about direct democracy, and to the degree that new media technologies, as well as the polarization of our politics, have increased, the opportunities for demagogues to flatter factions by using this technology, it represents the founders’ nightmare.
Mila Atmos: [00:45:03] That's next time on Future Hindsight.
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This episode was produced by Zack Travis and me. Until next time, stay engaged. The Democracy Group: [00:46:02] This podcast is part of the democracy Group.