Biden’s loan forgiveness is not enough

Bella Lee, Staff writer

Recently, news has been swirling about the student loan forgiveness plan that President Joe Biden is attempting to forge together. Under this plan, students could have up to $20,000 in loans forgiven. It’s a start, but it’s a slow one. For years, there have been arguments against having a student loan forgiveness plan. Older members of society, who worked to pay off their loans, feel that this plan is a slap in the face. However, that would be like saying finding a cure to cancer is a slap in the face to everyone that has died of cancer. The reason for having this plan in place is so that future generations don’t have to go through the same hardships as we did.It’s a two-sided coin; our older relatives always say that they want our lives to be easier than theirs, and when our lives end up that way, they complain that we don’t have it as hard as they do. Gen Z is slated to be the first generation where we will not outlive our parents, due to stresses like student loans, medical care and the economy. While the student loan forgiveness plan is certainly helpful, it barely makes a dent on what could be helping students that want to go to college. Even lifting $20,000 of debt off a student can maybe take care of a semester or a year of payments if they are lucky. The biggest thing that could benefit students in today’s day and age is simply if we had free college. Most European countries offer this opportunity, with Germany even extending the offer to non-citizens. Despite all this, the arguments that we need to suffer to get higher education like our predecessors will remain hanging over our heads. People have taken to social media to share their plights with paying off student loans. One individual took to Reddit to share a screenshot where they had paid off $6,961.95 of a $7,000 loan. In any perfect world, that would leave only $38.05 left to be paid off, except their remaining balance was still $2,854.19. Another individual shows their payments over the course of a calendar year, where they pay the same amount every month, hoping to take off $5,921.52 off a $86,368.44 loan. However, with every monthly payment they make, the remaining balance remains the same. There are even cases of people owing more than they originally borrowed, such as a law school graduate on Twitter saying they graduated with $250,000 in debt and owing $315,000 after six years of payments. In the end, the main culprit of this is interest, which sucks in most of the money that is being paid. Out of one individual’s $272.21 loan payment, only $15.14 of it went to the principal amount, while the rest went to interest. As of this writing, the United States has a total of $1.617 trillion in student loan debt. We need more than just the current forgiveness plan if we really want to be successful after college.