“In August 2022, Biden announced a blanket forgiveness of up to $20,000 in federal student loans for single borrowers earning less than $125,000 or couples earning less than $250,000. This plan—estimated to cost over $500 billion—was swiftly blocked in federal court, and the Supreme Court later struck it down as an unconstitutional exercise of the spending power.
While Biden couldn’t quite bring home the grand prize, he managed to cancel billions in student loans through now-blocked changes to the federal student loan program. Unsurprisingly, these changes also led to a big increase in the estimated 2024 federal deficit—a $145 billion hike.
The seminal achievement of Biden’s student loan overhaul was the introduction of the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan, an income-driven repayment plan that dramatically reduces most borrowers’ monthly payments. Under the previous version of the program, borrowers were directed to pay 10 percent of their discretionary income (calculated as earnings above 150 percent of the federal poverty rate) for 20 years before receiving forgiveness. Borrowers will now pay just 5 percent of their discretionary income (now estimated as earnings more than 225 percent of the federal poverty level), with some receiving forgiveness after only 10 years. While the program was estimated to cost taxpayers nearly $500 billion over the next decade, federal courts fully blocked the program by July 2024.
If somehow allowed to go forward, the SAVE plan would be likely to incentivize students to take on much larger student loan balances, because the program requires borrowers to pay so little back before forgiveness. Ultimately, it’s difficult to see how this extra spending doesn’t encourage colleges to hike tuition.”
“A handful of schools, including Amherst and Johns Hopkins, had ended the practice of giving admissions to the children of alumni — so called legacy preferences — in the years before affirmative action was struck down. Seven more ended the practice after the Supreme Court’s decision last year, and for a minute it appeared the dominoes would fall — but then no other college followed suit.
Meanwhile, many have doubled down on legacy preference and other mechanisms of exclusion that drive the massive wealth disparities on these campuses. And no “elite” college has made an explicit commitment to give a leg up in the admissions process based on socioeconomic disadvantage — the most obvious mechanism for promoting diversity. For several years now, at Harvard and 37 other U.S. colleges and universities, more students have come from the top 1 percent of the income distribution than the bottom 60 percent.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/06/25/supreme-court-affirmative-action-ruling-elite-colleges-00164902https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/06/25/supreme-court-affirmative-action-ruling-elite-colleges-00164902
“One challenge of free speech advocacy is holding the line even when the speech in question is vile. Then you must make distinctions between acceptable forms of expression and those that violate the rights of others. That’s why it’s important to have clear, firm principles applied equally to all points of view. In the absence of clarity, you find yourself making things up as you go along—like too many institutions of higher learning at a moment of campus unrest.”