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Andy wants to share one of his favorite episodes from this year that’s just as relevant today as it was when we taped it. Millions of student loan borrowers breathed a sigh of relief after the White House revealed a plan to wipe clean a huge swath of debt (though it’s currently tied up in the courts). How meaningful is this policy, what are the broader implications to the economy, and will it help future borrowers? Harvard Economist Susan Dynarski and the Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Andre Perry break down the plan and use their own experiences to humanize the root problems that this relief begins to address. Plus, Andre argues why you will benefit from this policy even if you won’t get debt wiped personally.

Keep up with Andy on Twitter @ASlavitt.

Follow Susan Dynarski and Andre Perry on Twitter @dynarski and @andreperryedu.

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Check out these resources from today’s episode: 

• Sign up for updates on the student loan forgiveness application here: https://www.ed.gov/subscriptions
• Read why Susan changed her mind about student debt forgiveness: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/30/opinion/student-loan-debt-relief-biden.html
• Read why Andre believes debt forgiveness is a start to solving the root problem for borrowers: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2022/08/25/bidens-student-debt-cancellation-doesnt-solve-the-root-problems-facing-borrowers-but-its-a-start/
• Find vaccines, masks, testing, treatments, and other resources in your community: https://www.covid.gov/
• Order Andy’s book, “Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response”: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250770165

Stay up to date with us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at @LemonadaMedia.

For additional resources, information, and a transcript of the episode, visit lemonadamedia.com/show/inthebubble.

Transcript

SPEAKERS

Andy Slavitt, Susan Dynarski, Andre Perry

Andy Slavitt  00:17

Welcome to IN THE BUBBLE. I’m Andy Slavitt. And today is September 2nd, God September. So the White House revealed a plan that is going to forgive some or all of student debt, and a number of other features. And we’re gonna get into that today, we want to both clarify, I think, what are the changes that are being put forward. But also, there’s a lot of feelings about these changes, there’s a lot of opinions. And a lot of it depends on where you sit. Some of what you hear, has to do with people’s own personal circumstances. There’s some people who miss breed some resentment, I suffered, either I didn’t go to college, or I didn’t go to college, I didn’t go to college I want or I went to college and had a lot of debt, and I paid it down. So if I’m suffering, you should suffer. There’s some of that. The next thing you hear is people get into the topic, is this a band aid? Or is this a real solution isn’t a real problem that college costs are so high? And will this make it even more expensive? And will this will this create any accountability for the cost of education? You also hear this question about the priorities of the country. What should we be giving tax incentives for? There’s also this conversation about how debt burdens Americans and particularly how it burdens Americans unequally, like many things in society, student loan debt falls more heavily on Black people. And then finally, there is this ethical political element to this conversation, which is that increasingly, people are saying that Democrats are becoming the party or have become the party of the college educated, and Republicans are not. And so there’s a sort of political intonation here. All of these are threads here. All these are complex. And I’m sure we, it’s possible that we all have multiple types of feelings about the same topic that happens. Okay, who’s gonna sort it out for us today? Andre Perry. He’s a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute. How’re you doing, Andre, thanks for coming THE BUBBLE.

Andre Perry  02:22

Hey, thanks for having me IN THE BUBBLE.

Andy Slavitt  02:25

the bubble. And Susan Dynarski, who is a professor and an economist at Harvard University, which I think it’s a pretty expensive school. Welcome, Susan. Welcome, Su.

Susan Dynarski  02:36

Thanks for having me.

Andy Slavitt  02:38

Okay, let’s get into it. This is a meaty topic. Tough topic. I know it’s one that President Biden struggled with. And I think a lot of people struggle with what the right answer is here. But can we start with the basics of this policy? What is the policy actually going to do? It maybe Su you can begin by just giving us the broad outlines of what debt is forgiven? And I know, there’s a couple of other features that are important here.

Susan Dynarski  03:04

So the forgiveness is for federal loans, which is basically the vast majority of student loans in the US at this point. And $10,000 is forgiven for those with incomes up to 125,000 singles, 250k couples, and that’s doubled to 20,000, if somebody meets those income requirements, and also was a Pell Grant recipient when they were an undergraduate, and that is a grant program that’s focused on people with incomes below the median income. So this is going to be folks who grew up low income.

Andy Slavitt  03:49

Andre, what would you add? How would he talk a little bit about how many people are affected by this? And yeah, who is affected by this?

Andre Perry  03:56

Well, in terms of debt cancellation, the White House estimates it will provide relief for up to 43 million borrowers and it will cancel the debt of roughly about 20 million borrowers. And but also there were some other aspects of the plan. They are trying to overhaul income based repayment plans, which were very complex and poorly managed. The Biden plan lowers the amount borrowers have to pay in terms of a percentage of their income from the reduce it from 10% to 5%. And it forgives loan balances after 10 years instead of 20. From what it used to do, in addition and tries to address the public service loan forgiveness program, which provided forgiveness for people working in public jobs, not a nonprofit job. Oops. But the highlight of this plan is the forgiveness. And it is worth noting that there was a, somewhat of a debate that I was a part of and others were a part of whether or not this plan was regressive or did it more or less benefit the rich, largely, because when you look at the dollar amount of those loans, most of the that amount, essentially go to high income borrowers who are pursuing graduate degrees. But when you look at the number of individual loans, according our research, most of those loans go to low wealth, people. So you know, I was on the side of, hey, when you look at wealth, you really can see how debt cancellation will help low wealth people.

Andy Slavitt  05:56

And presumably that means families that haven’t had generations to build up wealth in this country.

Andre Perry  06:01

Absolutely. So and Well, I’m sure we’ll talk about that soon. But, you know, I’ve been more on that side of, hey, let’s consider wealth when we are constructing a plan, not that we means test for wealth. But we have to keep that in the back of our minds, because we don’t, what we don’t want to do in terms of creating an income cap, neglect, the people who did everything they were told to do that get good grades, went to college went to the best schools, and they may even have a good job, but they have very different wealth profiles than other people. And I’m really focused on black and brown people in that regard.

Andy Slavitt  06:46

How did we arrive Su, at the 10 and $20,000 figures? Is there logic behind that?

Susan Dynarski  06:52

Well, they’re round numbers. And they’re easy to say. But I think, you know, basically, you know that for an undergraduate, the max, an undergraduate can take out through the sort of plain vanilla direct loan programs is about 30,000. Right? So for somebody who does four years, five years, in college, that’s what they would have borrowed. If you look at the distribution of loans. And you know, the distribution of loan debt kind of looks like the distribution of income in our country, there’s a few people who have a lot, and a lot of people who don’t have much, right, so if you forgive $10,000, you wipe out a third of borrowers right there. And then about 53% of borrowers have less than 20,000. So I think those numbers were driving in part, you know, what they saw in terms of forgiveness, a small amount was gonna knock out a lot of small accounts, which, frankly, are expensive to service, right, and don’t yield much revenue for the government. So it’s kind of a win win, you know, those were a headache for everybody. And as the government is restarting the repayment later this fall, you’ve now going to have 10s of millions accounts that they’re not gonna have to deal with anymore. Right. So it’s gonna make easier the administrative process of restarting and reforming the existing repayment system.

Andy Slavitt  08:17

I think I tried to put myself in the White House as this debate was going on. Is it what for months and over a year, or longer? Yeah, there were some who were saying, Hey, we should worry about more, we should worry about 50,000. And plenty of people who thought way beyond any was a bad idea. And I guess I want to ask, was this a happy medium? Let’s put the baby in the middle.

Andre Perry  08:41

I mean, it was very Biden nest in a sense of, I mean, in that debate, I talked about regressivity. There were just a lot of people who really latched on to the idea that most loans about a third are under $10,000. And there were a lot of people like me, who said, Look, you know, one from a wealth perspective, what we we’ve shown in various studies, that the more debt, you cancel them, the more you narrow the racial wealth divide. So it does have an impact on the racial wealth divide. And isn’t that the reason why Black people have so much more debt in the first place? And so for me, I what I saw Biden doing, and particularly, it was really with his Pell Grant, because the aspect of this, he’s giving $20,000 of relief and Pell Grant money, which is kind of a workaround for race because Black people are twice as likely to be Pell eligible. And it’s kind of a proxy for First Gen. It’s brilliant. So when you talk about a savvy political move to add that Pell Grant piece doubling up, it kind of assuage all those concerns about, like the wealth concern. And it really said, I mean, if you are a, an advocate for relief, it is hard to go come back, even though you hear people saying, I was not enough. It’s not like they’re going to have a full out campaign of it’s not enough. For a lot of people, it’s everything. So, exactly. So I thought that was such a crafty policy move.

Susan Dynarski  10:39

Well, it gets to the intergenerational nature of poverty, right, because for those who were, you know, so the Pell Grant, you’re gonna get it, if you’re under 24, kind of a traditional college student and your parents are low income. That’s right, you’re also going to get it if you’re an independent student, you know, an older student and your own income is low. But the first one means that we are getting at intergenerational families of poverty, right. So that’s the piece of it, I think, that gets at the first gens and gets at the low wealth and gets at the black white divide on who has wealth in this country.

Andy Slavitt  11:20

We’re gonna take a quick break, and we’re gonna come back, one of you has had your mind changed over time about student loan forgiveness, and we’re gonna talk about that. Su, you have a really interesting background that you bring to this topic. You’re an economist, who studies education. You’re also someone who’s I believe your father didn’t graduate high school. And you ended up attending Harvard, and now you’re a Harvard professor, can you talk about what your views had been historically on the student loan forgiveness and how it’s evolved, and what’s caused it to evolve?

Susan Dynarski  12:17

So, you could summarize my evolution as losing hope, in the policy process. When I started talking to the press, doing policy around student loans, a lot of the narrative was around, oh, Pete, this person from NYU, in women’s studies has $100,000 in student debt. And that was the poster child. And I was I spent a bunch of time using the data to say this was false, right. So, you know, what I saw was a system in which people were taking out moderate amounts of money for degrees that were worth a lot of money. And if we had repayment plans that worked properly, then everything would be cool. You know, I brought in people from Australia and from England, to talk about how they had their programs set up there, they function perfectly well, a lot of the world has student loans, only the US has the mess that we have is because our repayment system is a mess, also because our social safety net is shredded. And that means that people can’t afford anything at the bottom of the distribution. But the fact is, I had some hope I wrote policy proposals about how to introduce an Australia like system here, wrote it for the Hamilton Project. And then decades past, things didn’t get better in terms of the administration of the loans in terms of the monitoring of the loans, and the debt volumes kept going up. And the defaults kept going up in the great recession was actually a big turning point. Because at that time, we state slashed funding to their community colleges and to their public universities, and tuition spiked. And classes were overcrowded. People went to the for profits. People were borrowing for the first time really in great numbers to go to community colleges. We hadn’t seen that in the past. Right. So the people who go to for profits and go to community colleges, basically look the same demographically, except when they go to the for profits, they’re paying enormous tuitions, and they’re all taking up very large loans. Traditionally, people have not borrowed to go to community colleges, they started doing it a lot more during the recession. And they started defaulting on the loans at the same rate as people were defaulting at the for profits. So everything I mean, the carnage, the blood on the ground was just getting worse and worse, and the policy response was pretty much nil. So it’s that political paralysis. That made me think, okay, we’re not fixing this. There’s a whole generation of people who’ve been hurt by it. We need to essentially make reparations to those folk, yes, going forward. We need to fix it. But looking backward, we need do something to fix the generation that got hurt.

Andy Slavitt  15:03

Well, underlying what you’re saying, and what both of you are saying is, what’s happened to the underlying cost of higher education? Can you explain just in real terms, what it was like to grow up a few decades ago? And what the costs of college look like to folks, compared to what it looks like someone who is contemplating college at any level community, you know, state colleges, private colleges, what all that is translates into in terms of people’s ability to afford it.

Susan Dynarski  15:32

My sister’s, you know, I grew up in Boston, the Boston area, and my sisters both went to UMass Boston, you know, the commuter school here in Boston. And when they went in the mid-70s, about 10 years older than me, tuition was $600 a year. Right? That was for the whole year. That’s not per credit. That was for the whole year. In current terms, that’s about $3,600. That’s our parking space. Right? Exactly. No, it is exactly. And so you can earn the minimum wage at that time, and Massachusetts was $1.60. So you could at that time, work, like 300 hours and pay for your tuition and required fees. That’s everything that was the cost of attending UMass, right? So that’s why you hear so many of the boomers on, you know, saying I worked my way through college, you know, I sweated and slaved at McDonald’s or whatever, the thing is, you could, at a minimum wage, you could work over the summer and pay your tuition that is now not possible. So in Massachusetts, again, tuition is now $16,000. And we actually have a high minimum wage, it’s about $14, you know, a lot of the country, it’s still the 725 federal minimum. So in Massachusetts, you would work 1100 hours. So that’s year round halftime, in order to pay for your full time education. If you’re in another state where tuition is similar, and there’s lots of them, and you can get $7 an hour minimum, it’s 2000 hours of work to pay for your full time education. So tell me how you’re going to go to school full time and also work full time. In order to pay it. It’s just not people can’t do it the way they once did. We let the minimum wage slide a lot. So that’s one big piece of it. And we stopped investing in colleges, public colleges, it was you know, it’s not that in 1975, UMass was so efficient that it was delivering education at a cost to society of $600 a year, it’s at the state of Massachusetts was pouring money into the UMass system, which let them keep tuition that low. This is no big mystery. This is no Bennett hypothesis. This is not like some economic mystery about why public institutions, tuitions have gone up, it’s that somebody has to pay for it. It used to be the taxpayer. And now it’s been shifted on to the students and their families. Just like in lots of other sectors, the risk has been shifted from society, on individuals, see also pensions, right, and other health care, right. So we have shifted it onto individuals and stopped taking care of people as a society. And the risk is enormous.

Andy Slavitt  18:14

And then this is what happens, we can all just break it. So Andre, is this is really loud, basically, these costs of higher education to skyrocket. And then we’ve said to people, hey, don’t worry, if you want to go, we’ll charge you exceptionally high interest rates and put you in a significant amount of debt. And hey, then it’s accessible. So we could say to ourselves, you know, college just get higher education is theoretically available to everybody. Right?

Andre Perry  18:40

Right. And, you know, I’ll just mention a little bit of a bit about my background that influenced me on this issue. I became an assistant professor at the University of New Orleans in 2004. got tenure became a dean. And one thing I’ve noticed, during my academic career, I’ve never seen a tuition hike. A president didn’t like, if, if, if something happened in life sciences or in biology where they mismanaged the budget, the institution raise tuition, if there was a project they wanted to do on campus, and they didn’t have a revenue. They increase tuition. You know, you hear this all the time about the way that the student loan program is structured, you have this free money that enables essentially price gouging to occur. And that is true. I mean, I’ve seen some of the most irresponsible educational leaders show themselves in regards to increasing tuition.

Andy Slavitt  19:50

Well, can I see a question about that university president Andre, the university president who says hey, you know, we can always just take this up 5% a year. In their minds there, are they also having either an internal dialogue or dialogue with their team, which says, but don’t worry, we’ve got student loans available. So this isn’t going to hurt access, is that kind of the kind of just sort of wish the problem way that way?

Andre Perry  20:15

I’ll say this that I remember when the first time I raised this issue, I was told after the meeting, Hey, you want to be careful? Because this is about the future of the institution. And I would always go, you know, what about current students? I mean, I mean, because we were literally jacking up the price like 5%, almost every year. And in some cases more. And I just I said, you know, no other area, can you do this, and get away with it. And so in the higher ed space that existed for 30, I mean, tuition has increased threefold in the last 30 years more in some cases. So in my professional experience, there’s this palpable tension of people for particularly in professors who write about this issue, talk about this issue. And administrators, who, essentially it feels like they are just simply don’t care. I mean, it’s, I mean it’s hard to articulate this problem. But it’s true, right?

Andy Slavitt  21:34

I think we got a teachable moment here for the audience. I just want to start make the teachable moment, here’s the teachable moment. If you are ever in a meeting in a room with a bunch of people, and you say something, and after the meeting, you get pulled aside and told, Hey, you want to be careful. You are on the right track. I guarantee you, you are on the right track, you have just that sniffing dog has just found the truffle.

Andre Perry  22:01

And can I just add this one thing, and I worked at the University in New Orleans. And we one point Bobby Jindal became governor, he cut higher education by 40% in a matter of like, three, four years 40%. And you had university presidents so afraid of the governor? He said, Well, the only way we can make this up is by increasing tuition. And there was no push back.

Andy Slavitt  22:30

We could do a whole episode on Bobby Jindal baby, but I can tell you one other thing. He took over as governor Luisi and he had a state of the art system for rolling enrolling people in Medicaid. He bought balled the system. For Medicaid, we’re gonna do a quick break, we’re gonna come back and we’re going to talk about some of the other side of this argument and some of the other elements of this bill. Okay, now, there is another side to this argument that I think it’s worth hearing out for all of the good things for people, all the necessary reasons that we’ve just described for how this helps individuals affected by this families affected by this. There, people have pointed out that there’s still a large number of people who never get the chance to go to college for whatever reason in this country. And that this loan forgiveness is for elites, or it’s at the very minimum, they’d say, it’s for people that are Democratic voters. That’s some of the criticism, but they would also say that, you know, falling on people who go to get to go to college, when still there are so many people who don’t get to go to college is an inequitable thing to do. But what’s your message to them? Andre?

Andre Perry  24:03

Yeah, I mean, I think that takes on a very myopic idea of how an education helps a person. I mean, we live in a knowledge economy. And the reality is that the skills that are attained in college has helped overall GDP has helped states cities, municipalities, the products we buy, this idea that college at a college education is a luxury is not real. And so for me, I just think it fits into this very fractured society where we don’t see the communal good of education.

Susan Dynarski  24:47

And we traditionally did, just to set. This is an intergenerational shift. And I think in part, this is a matter of intergenerational justice. Because we had a cohort, we’re gonna we could call them the baby boomers that went to college for free in the $600, a year kind of free, basically close to free, because taxpayers were paying for them. The taxpayers, we had debt for a long, long time, when colleges were mostly White, and mostly male college was free. And then we had a tax revolt. And we started cutting off money to the colleges. And so you had the baby boomers went to college for free, and then cut their own taxes. So they double dipped. And they screwed over the next generations, their children and their grandchildren, who then have to go into debt. So it is not outside the realm of our cultural or economic values as a country that society would pay for college. It’s what we did most of our history. Yes, and

Andy Slavitt  25:52

Every tax incentive doesn’t affect and help everybody.

Susan Dynarski  25:57

Homeowners, is a good example. The mortgage interest deduction is incredibly regressive.

Andre Perry 26:03

And I remember one of my first arguments in public policy, when I was an undergraduate, I used to argue how patently unfair tax code was to homeowners and to married people, because at the time, I didn’t see myself getting married or no, that’s why this like patently unfair why we do that I remember my professor said, Hey, because there’s a belief that this is good for the country. And there’s an analogous situation here, this is good for the country. Now, I and we will probably talk about this, but this is not a solution by any means. Like this is not a solution. So ultimately, and you know, I say this all the time that higher it is as basic as elementary and secondary is, and we should have a system that reflects that we don’t ask parents to take out a loan to send their kids to elementary and secondary school, we shouldn’t have to do it for public institutions, I just want to be clear about that. And community colleges are already moving in this direction, because the Pell Grant amount because of state subsidy, you can go to community college, essentially for quote unquote, free, but we don’t necessarily have a public option for four years. And that’s where we need to move towards that.

Andy Slavitt  27:28

But let me ask you what you brought up earlier, I’ll ask you both this question. I think if I understand it correctly, that you said that going forward, your payments will be capped at 5% of your income. And that after 10 years, whatever your balance is, it will be forgiven. Is that a step in the right direction? If someone is going to send a high schooler to college, and they’re worried about debt, and that or a student is going to take on that debt themselves? Is that a big step forward for them? I recognize it’s not necessarily everything.

Susan Dynarski  28:03

If the administration of the programs gets fixed, it can be what we’ve seen, as I said in the past, is that the people who need it most don’t get enrolled. So and this is what I worry about with forgiveness as well. Right? I’m worried that the people who need it most are not going to get through the application process because they has the most chaotic lives, you know, they’re moving apartments, they’re out of work, their addresses are changing. And getting through this kind of bureaucratic process, like with Medicaid and other need based programs, can end up pushing out the people who need it most. So the executive order is limited in what it can do what needs to happen in order to reform things overall. I agree with Andre, that basically, we need to make community college free. Yes, it is free right now with Pell Grants, I’d like to see it tuition free so that the Pell Grant can go to living expenses. And the rest of the world, there are separate funding and aid streams for BA’s, and for vocational training and sub baccalaureate. And in the rest of the world, the equivalent of community colleges and trade schools are free. You certainly don’t see people taking out loans for it. And I think we need to do something equivalent, the default rate for people who have a BA, they’re in the single digits. Right. That’s not where the problem is. So a loan program makes sense there I think, it can or it can make sense, though, there are other ways to do it. We can make it free with taxpayers money, right? But for the community colleges in particular, I don’t think they should be funded with student loans. We need to have generous enough grants that people can live and a generous enough minimum wage that people can work part time and pay their way through school because this is not a population that should be taking out loans.

Andy Slavitt  29:55

Well, you answered my next question, which is what is your vision for a better way? Andre to ask you the same question.

Andre Perry  30:02

No, I think that is clear. My vision for a better way is quote unquote, free college, I think that nomenclature gets a bad rap because it is subsidized education is not free per se. But I do believe that we should have a public option at the four year realm as well, I just think the way state budgets and higher ed are set up community colleges are like, just there, they’re almost there. And so we can easily start transitioning toward that space, it’s something else I would like to see happen. And because an underreported part of the problem is that comprehensive four years are not treating students are graduating students at a level which they should I again, I don’t want to disparage one of my former employers. But when I was at the University of New Orleans, it was, you know, taking students not really take care of them, they would leave, they would have student debt. And we just didn’t take care of them. And it created a market for predatory proprietary schools that really didn’t care about those students, I mostly worry about this the bad service that many students are getting at public institutions, putting them in peril in the first place. So that’s just, you know, another part of the problem we just don’t talk about.

Susan Dynarski  31:39

And I’d like to suggest, you know, the, the worst, the more we starve the public sector, the more the for profit sector grows, we actually have direct evidence on this, when we starve Community Colleges of cash, the for profit sector ropes, which, you know, I suspect, I haven’t seen anybody do the numbers on this, but I suspect, you know, we basically save a penny and spend a pound when we do this, because the amount that we pay off in student loan defaults, when folks go to the for profits may have paid several times over for somebody to go to a community college. So in my view, we kick the for profits out of the student aid program completely. And that gets rid of a lot of the costs of the defaulting right now. The for profit colleges, I think account for, you know, they’re about 10% of enrollment, but something like 40% of default dollars.

Andy Slavitt  32:33

Let me close with this one final question, which is, I wanted to start thinking about the impact of this, what’s just happened on society? And I want to finish on what I think is a hopeful note, but you may tell me otherwise. Andre, how will these reforms and others could come? Will they have an impact on reducing inequality in the US? Starting with just thinking about the millions of people that 1/3 of the 40 million whose lives have just been transformed. Can you talk about the racial makeup of that group? How important is this factor? And what will change?

Andre Perry  33:13

Well, one, I think the move by Biden reflected there is already increased power among underrepresented groups. I don’t think Biden does this without demands from Black advocates during the 2020 uprising when he was then Democratic nominee or candidate, I really think you saw that additional push from during that period, help folks who’ve been working on this issue for years and finally came to the fore politically, I do think that it will provide relief for millions of people, particularly the Pell Grant aspect of this will help a lot of people who really do need help. And I, I do believe that the way Biden set this up, you’re almost going to inevitably have to have a conversation about systemic change. This is not really sustainable this relief. Like at some point, you’re gonna have to talk about reforming systems because sooner this eventually, professors in academics and think tankers, they’re gonna say what I’ve been saying this is not a solution. This is a band aid, what’s the solution? And then, so, a future president, future leaders are going to have to take this on. So I think it’s providing immediate relief, but it will lead to reform that will provide even more.

Andre Perry  33:15

Any final thoughts from you, Su?

Susan Dynarski  33:54

The getting people out of the student loan repayment system is going to fix a lot of financial lives in a way that $10,000 doesn’t matter. Sure, so you can have a loan for $3,000. And if you’re in default on that, the impact it has on your financial well-being is the same as if you went into default on $50,000, you’ve got a blot on your credit record. That means in some states, you lose your commercial license to drive a truck, right, you can’t get into many rental properties, there are jobs, there are employment situations you’re locked out of, because employers look at credit records. So this is not like some theoretical input. We have evidence on this, that if you get people out of this system and get them out of risk of default, their likelihood of owning a home goes up their credit records improve, this actually changes lives in a way that this you know, what we look at is the 10,000, or monthly payment doesn’t capture. So I think for people who are particularly on the edge financially, if we can get them the money. So I want the administration to monitor what the take up rate looks like. And if we’re seeing that disproportionately the upper income debtors are the ones taking this up, we need to move in quickly and change the process. We waited decades to recognize this for the income driven programs. And as a result, the people who have benefited them from the most are the people with graduate degrees and fairly high incomes. And we can’t have this happen again, we need to be monitoring this in real time.

Andy Slavitt  36:31

Implementation is actually an appropriate note to finish on. Thank you both, my favorite conversations are the ones I learned a lot from, I learned a lot from both of you. And I think is, you know, I can’t speak for everybody as we reflect on our feelings here about this issue. But I think there’s it’s a very simple level. We know how much suffering goes on in society, whether it’s from a pandemic or whether it’s from poverty, or whether it’s from discrimination, or whatever it is, and we bone that fact all the time. And even if this doesn’t impact any of us personally, take the time to feel a little bit of the reverse, a little bit of potential the joy and relief that millions of people are feeling in their lives. And that feeling of generosity and graciousness that you feel when you don’t personally impact are personally impacted. But other’s lives just improved. In in one fell swoop, there’s very few times when millions of people’s lives improve in a day. Subject implementation, of course. So I think that’s a happy feeling. It should make us all feel good. It’s the world we want to recapture in our society. We all complain about it. We all complain that we’ve lost it. And that’s how I’m gonna leave it.

Susan Dynarski  37:47

Normalized, caring about other people.

Andy Slavitt  37:51

Amen. Thank you both.

Susan Dynarski  37:53

All right, thank you take care.

Andy Slavitt  37:54

Okay, let’s talk about what’s next. Next is labor day. Monday. Hope that’s a treat for everybody and you get a day off work. Also boosters. Both the FDA and the CDC have meant to make boosters available to people 12 and above. That’s what about for Pfizer, 18 and above for Moderna. And these are new boosters that are targeted at BA5 and yes, I will be getting one, even though I had COVID. Coming up in in the bubble. Monday show is Dr. Sanjay Gupta, physician from CNN, America’s doctor. Great episode. He’s got such a nice touch. Wednesday and Friday. Both of the episodes are about kids and how we get back to school and learning loss and even if you don’t have kids or grandkids or any kid yourself. fascinating research out from reporter on the economy. That’s who was with NPR is her education reporter and she really talks about what was stolen from kids during this year. Is that really a verdict and whether or not school should or shouldn’t have closed. It’s really more verdict what the impact has been. Amazing, amazing, amazing person. Amazing story. Friday, we’re gonna go to Tennessee and Oakland and just look at how schools are addressing the learning loss to kids about. Then, coming up the following week. We have Joe Biden’s Chief of Staff Ron Klain for a very wide ranging, amazing interview. That’s going to be really fun. We have the president of Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Neel Kashkari, we’re going to talk about the Fed raising rates and what all that means. Lots of other good shows coming up during this month of September and beyond. And we’re with you. Okay. Have a really enjoyable long weekend. We will talk to you Monday.

CREDITS  40:16

Thanks for listening to IN THE BUBBLE. We’re a production of Lemonada Media. Kathryn Barnes, Jackie Harris and Kyle Shiely produced our show, and they’re great. Our mix is by Noah Smith and James Barber, and they’re great, too. Steve Nelson is the vice president of the weekly content, and he’s okay, too. And of course, the ultimate bosses, Jessica Cordova Kramer and Stephanie Wittels Wachs, they executive produced the show, we love them dearly. Our theme was composed by Dan Molad and Oliver Hill, with additional music by Ivan Kuraev. You can find out more about our show on social media at @LemonadaMedia where you’ll also get the transcript of the show. And you can find me at @ASlavitt on Twitter. If you like what you heard today, why don’t you tell your friends to listen as well, and get them to write a review. Thanks so much, talk to you next time.