You Are No Longer a Loan

How the student debt abolition movement persevered and ultimately won a Biden executive order, despite or perhaps in spite of the indifference of Big Philanthropy

Last week, after a long period of deliberation, President Joe Biden announced that he would use his executive power to cancel a massive amount of student loan debt held by 43 million Americans—up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients (nearly all of whom come from poor and working class families) and up to $10,000 for non-Pell grant recipients, with none of the relief going to people in the top 5% who make more than $125,000 a year (or $250,000 per household). About 20 million people could see their remaining balances wiped clean. Biden also moved to cap the maximum that undergraduate borrowers could be expected to pay per month, raise how much income is protected from repayment, and cover unpaid monthly interest costs as long as low-income borrowers make their monthly payments so their loan balance stops ballooning. While Biden’s plan is perhaps the most class-conscious action his administration has taken, it will also help close the racial wealth gap because Black students are more likely to have to borrow to afford college, more likely to take out larger loans and twice as likely to have gotten Pell grants.

Biden’s decision is a testament to the power of grassroots organizing and in particular to the young people who first found each other in the encampments of Occupy Wall Street eleven years ago and managed to build an independent movement for change not beholden to big money. Many of them had graduated from college deeply in debt and found themselves unemployed in the wake of the Great Recession or working dead-end minimum-wage service jobs. Though Occupy originally prided itself on having no demands, these folks eventually coalesced around a big one: a Jubilee for student debtors along with tuition-free college for all. On April 8, 2012, the Occupy Student Debt Campaign held 1TDay to mark the day that cumulative student debt topped one trillion dollars, earning derisive media coverage, as Astra Taylor, one of the key organizers, recounts in her history of the movement for The New Republic. She and her colleagues then scraped their way forward, eventually organizing the first-ever student debt strike in America, which brought together more than 200 debtors who had been defrauded by Corinthian Colleges, a predatory for-profit college chain. That led to their first victory, a promise from the Obama-era Department of Education to provide relief to defrauded students, though it dragged its feet in doing so.

Originally they called themselves Strike Debt, later changing their name to the Debt Collective, with a focus on strategic organizing that would ultimately get the government to act. They also gave members coaching and tools for resolving disputes over their personal debts, and formed an associated 501c4 called the Rolling Jubilee Fund that raised money to buy distressed loans at pennies to the dollar and then cancel them. Rolling Jubilee did more than abolish $32 million in medical, student, payday loan and probation debt; it turned heads. An NYU law student who joined the group, Luke Herrine, wrote a law journal article arguing that the Education Department had the power to cancel all student debt, and that caught the eye of Julie Margetta Morgan, a VP at the Roosevelt Institute think tank, who, as Hannah Levintova recounted for Mother Jones, then asked him to turn it into a white paper. Morgan then went to work advising Senator Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign, where canceling up to $50,000 of student debt became a centerpiece of her bid for the White House. Not to be outdone by Warren, Senator Bernie Sanders—who already had a slew of Occupy veterans working on his 2016 campaign—made an even more expansive call as part of his 2020 bid, touting “college for all” and debt cancellation as a key plank in his “21st century economic bill of rights.” Biden was far less generous—in keeping with his long-standing ties to the banking industry that so loves his state of Delaware—but offered that he’d waive the first $10,000 in student debt if elected president.

I’m going to skip detailing the rest of the story—how a pause in debt payments got included along with an eviction moratorium as part of the 2020 bipartisan response to the pandemic (in retrospect progressives are kind of lucky that the pandemic got in the way of Trump co-opting the debt cancellation idea, something he mused about in early 2020), how Senator Chuck Schumer came to be a big supporter of student debt cancellation after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a key ally of Sanders) started making noises about running for his Senate seat, how corporate-funded Democratic economists like Jason Furman and Melissa Kearney along with a whole raft of education policy wonks pooh-poohed and derided the idea, and how ultimately this past June a massive coalition of more than 550 community, civil rights, education, climate, health, consumer, labor, professional, food and farm, and student advocacy organizations came together to press Biden to act before the current payment moratorium expired—because I want to focus on something else: how this movement succeeded despite, or in spite of, the almost non-existent support it got from liberal and progressive philanthropy.

For years, the Debt Collective barely scraped by. This is partly because most big foundations simply don’t have a “bucket” for class-based organizing, preferring to prioritize individual issue areas or, in a more recent trend, to center giving money to organizations led by BIPOC people and women. The Ford Foundation, which announced that it would refocus all of its grantmaking on inequality in 2015, didn’t make its first grant to the group until 2017, when it gave its fiscal sponsor, the Sustainable Markets Foundation, $125,000. It re-upped with a “tie-off” grant of $125,000 in 2018, meaning that the group was told to expect no more general support from Ford going forward. Then in 2020 Ford gave it $100,000 for a Los Angeles Eviction Defense Tool. Only in 2021 did Ford return to giving the collective core support, in the amount of $100,000. (To give you a sense of scale and priorities, Ford gave the Center for Responsible Lending $6,166,000 between 2009-2018; in 2016 and 2017, it also gave now-defunct OZY Media $1,950,000 in grants to make two TV documentaries and twice put on its OZY Fest in Central Park.)

The Open Society Foundations were similarly indifferent to the Debt Collective, apportioning it a modest $100,000 in 2019 and following that up with a drab $50,000 grant in 2020 and nothing in 2021. The only group to give the Debt Collective consistent meaningful backing has been Way to Win, which provided up to $250,000 a year—but never on a multi-year basis. (Leah Hunt-Hendrix, one of Way to Win’s founders, is another Occupy alum.) A few smaller foundations have given the group money in recent years, including Solidaire, the Center for Cultural Innovation ($50,000), Libra ($50,000), and Preston Warner Ventures ($50,000).

Of course, as the Debt Collective admits on its financial disclosure page, “it’s [] hard to be an anti-capitalist organization asking foundations and funders for money.” At the same time, it notes that it had to do this, “because the majority of people we are organizing cannot afford dues or donations.” Less than 4% of its total budget currently comes from member dues. One rich donor relieving the debts of a graduating class at one university, say, Evan Spiegel of Snapchat, who gave the Otis College of Art and Design $10 million-plus to pay off the student loans of the Otis Class of 2022, could have written one similar check to the Debt Collective for say, five years of general support, and that investment could have ultimately wiped out hundreds of billions. Talk about ROI! Talk about Effective Altruism! But of course, it’s more likely that a camel would go through the eye of a needle first. And a windfall like that might have hampered the Debt Collective as much as it might have reduced the stress on its core organizers.

Nor is it clear that there was money available. Melissa Byrne, a Philadelphia-based Occupy activist who went on to work as Sanders’ New Hampshire state digital director in 2016 and his California field director in 2020, along with consulting for MoveOn, UltraViolet and the Working Families Party, initially tried to raise money for an effort to elevate the student debt issue called “WeThe45Million,” but hit a brick wall. “There was not any major funding for the advocacy work,” she told me, though she persisted in putting a huge amount of her free time into organizing on the issue. “I tried to raise money in 2010-2015 and was basically laughed at from donor types” who thought her goals were too radical. Only issues like for-profit college debt and accountability for servicers got some attention, “around the edges,” she said. And a lot of the available money came with ideological strings attached, she charges. “The Arnold Foundation put money into organizations working on these issues while publicly bashing cancellation,” for example. (Arnold’s statement on debt forgiveness is actually a lot like what the Biden administration ultimately chose: targeted rather than universal relief.) In her view, going to work for Sanders was the best way she could find to advance the issue, “and I ended up being right. Which is a lesson that you don’t always need to be a founder of an organization to accelerate the issue.”

Well, it seems to me that what really accelerated the issue was first and foremost the Debt Collective’s tenacious and creative organizing from 2012 to 2019, which then catapulted debt cancellation into the open Democratic presidential primary of 2019-2020. And during that entire time, the group was severely undernourished. “The movement to cancel student debt really was a grassroots-led, underdog, and under-funded effort,” Astra Taylor told me. A personal fellowship she won from the Shuttleworth Foundation was critical to keeping the work going from 2016-2019, she said. Taylor adds, “A lot of groups played a role in this victory, but there was no major backing, and most of the heavy lifting was done by smaller groups and individuals dedicating time they could spare. While I wish Debt Collective had more secure funding and staff, on balance I’d say we turned our scrappiness into a strength. We are a militant group and while claiming this win, we are already fighting for more, including some incredibly exciting work on medical debt abolition.”

Ultimately, lots of allies helped the cause to success, Taylor said. “Though its origins are in Occupy Wall Street and the Debt Collective's Corinthian debt strike, by the end a wide coalition of groups helped pushed this through, successfully playing an inside/outside game. Student Debt Crisis Center, UnidosUS, Wethe45Million, policy shops like Student Borrower Protection Center, Project on Predatory Student Lending, National Consumer Law Center, and others. The support of NAACP, Dream Defenders, New Georgia Project, and of course teachers and other labor unions was pivotal.” She also cites the effort of financial policy wonk Alexis Goldstein, who, while still at Americans for Financial Reform, launched the letter of support aimed at Biden, noting that it included “a big show of force from organized labor, including Amazon and Starbucks workers.”

Perhaps the relative indifference of Big Philanthropy to the Debt Collective and the overall movement to abolish student dept and make higher education free for all is of a piece with the corporate, privatized mindset that still dominates what passes for public discourse in America. Certainly the Debt Collective’s outsider status kept it from trimming its sails and allowed it to push the boundaries beyond the usual liberal nostrums to a more systemic solution. As Barmak Nassirian, an education policy analyst, remarked on Twitter, “The indignant reaction of corporatist Dems to loan forgiveness is partially driven by their outrage that an unbought and unbossed grass-roots movement, @StrikeDebt, achieved this incredible result without their permission and over their ‘strategic’ objections.”

Of course, none of this is over. While Biden’s decision is clearly popular with the public, there’s still enormous resistance being voiced from all kinds of Responsible People, who are having a very hard time understanding that education should be a right in a civilized society, not a privilege. To see things differently requires a break from this mindset, one that could only be nurtured inside the collective setting built by the Debt Collective’s work. Lift a glass their way, and more important, if you want to see this work expand, give them some money!

Odds and Ends

—A new paper from the dynamic duo of David Broockman and Joshua Kalla finds that while partisan loyalties have a big influence over voter choices, the less voters know about a candidate the greater the potential they can be persuaded by new information about them. In other words, define yourself or your opponent early!

—Here’s a fascinating thread on an experiment in a different kind of field organizing undertaken by David Alexis’ New York state senate campaign, called “Door to Ballot organizing,” where field canvassers were paired with specific voters for the duration of the campaign. While Alexis lost his race, his team says the technique doubled turnout where it worked.

—Speaking of NY politics, I think Ross Barkan is right in arguing that there’s no “mass movement” pushing for the Working Families Party to put primary loser Yuh-Line Niou on its ballot line to challenge Democratic primary winner Daniel Goldman this fall in the general election in NY’s 10th congressional district.

—Oh look, here’s a real-time map of recent edits to Wikipedia, worldwide.

Deep Thoughts

—A must-read from Peter Beinart on how some major American Jewish organizations have lost their way in the fight against antisemitism.