Watch: What does it mean to support ‘free college’?

Warren’s plan would cancel student debt up to $50,000 for borrowers who make less than $100,000 a year. For every $3 a borrower earns yearly over that $100,000, the amount of debt forgiven would decline by $1 . “So, for example, a person with a household income of $130,000 gets $40,000 in cancellation, while a person with household income of $160,000 gets $30,000 in cancellation,” she wrote. Those who earn more than $250,000 a year would not be eligible for any debt cancellation, and the cancellation for borrowers who do receive it would not be treated as taxable income.

Lindsey Burke, the director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, worries about the effects of a debt-cancellation policy on tuition. “Universities will continue to do what they’ve been able to do for decades, and that’s increase tuition, because they [will] know there are policies like debt-cancellation and loan forgiveness,” she says. “They enable universities to be as profligate as they always have been.”

What about those borrowers who have already paid off their loans? Warren’s plan, like other debt-cancellation plans that have been floated in recent years, is targeted to help those who need it most, and that’s a good start to addressing the debt that borrowers have already amassed, Tiffany Jones, the director of higher-education policy at the Education Trust, a nonprofit focused on education equity, told me. One potential weak point, however, is that the proposal focuses on income rather than wealth. When the racial-wealth gap is accounted for, targeting would need to be more specific than in Warren’s proposed policy in order to help those who truly need debt cancellation the most. That’s why, she added, it is heartening to see this proposal coupled with one that targets aid to historically black colleges and other minority-serving institutions.

Research has shown that student debt has devastating effects on black students in particular, and Democratic candidates have discussed that outsize debt burden as they’ve focused on historically black colleges and universities this election cycle in the hope of ginning up support among black voters. But Warren’s plan offers one thing that has yet to be promised to the black colleges in a significant way: money.

“For decades, Black Americans were kept out of higher education by virtue of overtly discriminatory policies,” Warren wrote. “Even as the civil rights movement rolled back racially discriminatory admissions policies, the stratification of our higher education system kept students of color concentrated in under-resourced institutions and left them vulnerable to predatory actors.” She hopes to create a fund of at least $50 billion to help HBCUs, which have historically been underfunded, as well as other minority-serving institutions—such as Hispanic-serving institutions and tribal colleges—spend as much money on each of their students as predominantly white institutions do.