Download
The author has published a follow-up blog post, answering some questions raised by this report. You can read it here.
Some advocates have called to forgive student loans because student loans contribute to racial and socioeconomic wealth gaps. The usual measures of financial wealth, however, is a misleading indicator of the economic status of student loan borrowers. Medical school graduates typically owe six-figure student loans but that doesn’t mean they are poorer than high-school graduates who did not go to college. Wealth, properly measured, should include the value of educational investments students borrowed to make. Measured appropriately, student debt is concentrated among high-wealth households and loan forgiveness is regressive whether measured by income, educational attainment, or wealth. Across-the-board forgiveness is therefore a costly and ineffective way to reduce economic gaps by race or socioeconomic status. Only targeted policies can address the inequities caused by federal student lending programs.
Read the full paper here»
The Brookings Institution is financed through the support of a diverse array of foundations, corporations, governments, individuals, as well as an endowment. A list of donors can be found in our annual reports published online here. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions in this report are solely those of its author(s) and are not influenced by any donation.
Report Produced by The Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy
Get updates on economics from Brookings