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In the United States, education is supposed to be an equalizer, and higher education in particular is key to improving your life chances. At least that’s how the story goes. But in fact, millions of people are unable to access higher education without going into debt. More than 44 million people owe student debt, and the total amount of outstanding debt in the United States has more than tripled since 2006, totaling more than $1.5 trillion — almost 8 percent of the country’s GDP. Meanwhile, real wage growth is up less than 7 percent over the same period, while rents are up more than 47 percent in real dollars. Rather than serving as an engine of economic advancement for the poor and working class, twenty-first-century higher education has created more inequality through the explosion in student debt. While the very rich spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to bribe or trick their way into college, the poor, working class, and middle class are forced to pay a premium to one section of the employing class (student lenders and loan servicing companies) to obtain a credential so the families that bought their way into elite schools can exploit their labor. The burden of student debt falls heaviest on black and Hispanic students, and the disparity in the amount owed between black students and white students grows significantly after graduation. But it doesn’t have to be this way. The secretary of education has the power to wipe out most student debt with the stroke of a pen. President Bernie Sanders could do this. If he wants to win the lifelong loyalty of tens of millions of predominantly young Americans to his politics, he should promise to cancel student debt as part of a bigger plan to advance tuition-free college for all, then follow through when he’s elected.

Why? Student lenders and financial companies prey on poor people (and, with higher education costs skyrocketing, even on the relatively comfortable) in order to make obscene amounts of money. Two of the largest loan servicing companies, Navient, and Nelnet, had revenues of $5.67 billion and $1.76 billion in 2018, respectively. These same companies had almost nine thousand consumer complaints filed against them for shady business practices in 2017. And the federal government, rather than ensure tuition to higher education is either nonexistent or affordable, instead takes the largest slice of the student-debt pie for itself — while these for-profit middlemen are the bane of every student debtor’s existence, the vast majority of student debt is ultimately owned by the federal government. Profiting from education is not a morally legitimate enterprise. Access to the wonder of accumulated human knowledge is every person’s birthright, not a business plan. College tuition should be free. But tuition costs are spiraling, with tuition at public institutions rising almost 34 percent in the decade ending in 2016, the most recent year for which figures are available. This has left many people with little choice but to take on large amounts of student debt, as evidenced by ballooning debt figures. So as we move to make college tuition-free for future students, we must also undo the damage wrought on several generations by past loan practices. The burden of student debt is a key contributor to the decline in class mobility for people born in the 1980s and later. With wages stagnant, jobs concentrated in a handful of expensive cities, and the few existing social welfare programs in the United States difficult to access and under constant threat, millions of people delay purchasing a home, having a child, saving for retirement, or even getting medical care because of crushing student debt. Student debt cuts so deep because it doesn’t just rip you off, it makes you feel like a failure. If college is supposed to be the key to a successful life, but you come out of it unable to make ends meet, you can’t help but feel it’s your fault. Forty-four million people are rightly sensitive about this issue — and they’re primed to be mobilized around it.