The coronavirus pandemic has pushed the entire country into a massive health and financial crisis. But well before coronavirus hit the United States, millions of young Americans were dealing with a crisis of their own: the crushing burden of student debt. By the end of the year, almost 4 million new graduates will join them, the majority of whom will face paying off student loans. With businesses and schools shuttering, workers getting laid off, and the economy in free fall, the need to cancel student loan debt is more urgent than ever.

Young people have taken to Twitter to make this clear. Tweets like this sarcastic one abound: “Millennials are so entitled asking for student loan forgiveness. I mean it’s not like we’ve faced two economic crashes/recessions and a global pandemic by the time I turned 30.” And after the New York Federal Reserve announced plans to inject $1.5 trillion into the financial system to help Wall Street, Twitter pointed out that there was something notable about that number. “For anyone who has ever scoffed at the idea of cancelling all student loan debt by saying that we could never afford it, THIS 👏🏽 IS 👏🏽 EXACTLY 👏🏽 HOW 👏🏽 MUCH 👏🏽 STUDENT 👏🏽 DEBT 👏🏽 IS 👏🏽 OWED 👏🏽 IN 👏🏽 THE 👏🏽 UNITED 👏🏽 STATES,” one user wrote. Young people’s message is clear: Congress must act with their interests in mind.

Over the past few years, a growing number of progressives have argued that the choice to push the cost of higher education onto individuals was immoral, discriminatory, destabilizing for the economy, and a strong argument for canceling outstanding debt. Now the facts are even more clear: Policymakers must take action, and they must do it now. Younger Americans will not be able to move beyond the second economic crisis of their lifetime without student debt relief.

The student debt crisis is starkly generational: While 15% of all adults have a student loan, about one third of individuals between 18 and 29 have them. For decades, young people have been told that higher education is an essential pathway to economic security, regardless of how much it costs. Unfortunately, for far too many, that’s not how things turned out. Even as the economy slowly recovered from the 2008 crash, wages continued to stagnate and college prices continued to rise as federal policy shifted the cost of college onto individuals through loans. Borrowers have struggled to pay back their loans and outstanding student debt grew by close to $1 trillion in a single decade. Now, student loans account for 35% of the riskiest household debt, and experts predict that nearly 40% of borrowers will default on their loans by 2023.

And the student debt crisis hit some students harder than others — predictably, its effects have been far worse for those who were already marginalized by our society. Students of color and women borrow more to attend school and earn less after graduating, a combination that makes paying down their debts particularly challenging. Twelve years after graduating college, the typical black borrower owed more than they originally borrowed and almost half of black student borrowers default on their loans. Meanwhile, women hold two-thirds of outstanding student debt.

The picture we paint here is news to many policymakers, who still believe that a student loan is a benign tool that helps young people to get ahead. But it is definitely not news to the borrowers who are living every day with student debt. They understand viscerally the injustice of the position the government put them in — and the peril that the current financial crisis poses.