Democratic candidates are promising student loan debt forgiveness, but do voters care?

When Sarah Brewster’s car broke down a couple months ago, the 26-year-old therapist panicked. She didn’t have $800 in cash to fix it, and the thought of a car loan overwhelmed her. How could she fit in another bill when she’s already living paycheck to paycheck, desperately trying to pay down her student debt?

Like many Americans also crippled by student loans, Brewster’s been making sacrifices since she graduated: She put off her wedding for two years and once she and her husband, Ryan, finally got married in November 2018, they decided they couldn’t afford a honeymoon. For Christmas, they budgeted for just one gift apiece. Ryan, a firefighter, is saddled with his own debt from a two-year program. Sarah alone owes $50,000. And with student loan payments of $700 a month, or almost as much as their monthly $1000 rent, they’re worried they can’t afford to have children.

Brewster, a Bernie Sanders supporter, says she will absolutely be thinking about student debt as she heads to the ballot box this year and that “I would like to hope that people my age would be more likely to vote because of it.”

She might not have much company.

Most of the Democratic presidential candidates have prioritized tackling the nation’s staggering student debt crisis and many have called for some form of debt forgiveness. But while campaigns have made college financing a major issue, and are likely to continue doing so in the final push before the Iowa Democratic caucus on Feb. 3, some voters say it’s just one of many factors that will impact who they cast their vote for.

Roughly 54% of Americans say the nation's student loan debt crisis is a major problem, according to a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll published in April. And roughly 67% of respondents said they had delayed or put off a major purchase because of student loans, while 40% said they’ve delayed a major life decision, such as starting a family.

In the U.S., student debt, the fastest-growing debt in the country, totals more than $1.5 trillion and has already surpassed credit card debt. In 2018, 65% of college seniors who graduated from public and private nonprofit colleges had student loan debt, according to The Institute for College Access & Success. Millennials, in particular, are hampered by higher education, as borrowers ages 25 to 34 owe almost $500 million, putting them behind in buying homes, saving for retirement and starting families.

The average borrower owes just under $30,000. But others owe much more. Generation X borrowers have the most student debt, followed by baby boomers, and then Millennials.

Cory Bluemling, a 41-year-old art teacher at a private Los Angeles school, has three degrees and estimates that he owes around $160,000 in a combination of federal and private loans. He describes his situation as “suffocating, overwhelming and so confusing.”

“If someone called me tomorrow and said, ‘Hey, you have another $30,000 that you owe to this person’ I’d probably say, ‘Wow, OK.’ … I feel so disconnected to them.”

Despite picking up odd jobs every summer, from bartending to hosting a trivia night to handyman work, Bluemling can only afford to make the minimum monthly payment — about $400 — which means he’ll likely be paying loans his whole life. When it comes to the election, the student debt crisis matters, but he’s thinking more about escalating tensions with Iran than anything else.

“My student loans don’t necessarily impact my vote, but it does impact the way I’m looking at Democrats in the field, and how I think about who can help us get a reasonable playing field for all Americans,” Bluemling says, though his top priority is “any person who can beat Trump.”

Most of the Democratic presidential candidates have vowed to confront the student loan crisis in some way, proposing that borrowers be allowed to refinance (Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota), or that the government buy back the majority of the debt (entrepreneur Andrew Yang). They’ve drawn on personal experience, too: Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, told voters he and his husband, Chasten, are working to pay down six figures of debt themselves.

But the most specific, detailed plans have come from Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Warren would forgive up to $50,000 for each individual earning less than $100,000, which would dramatically impact Americans with undergraduate degrees, but likely only make a small dent for Americans with graduate degrees. Last week, Warren said on day one of her presidency she would use executive action to cancel most student loans, sidestepping Congress on an issue that’s drawn ire from both Republicans and some moderate Democrats.

Sanders, on the other hand, has vowed to wipe out all student debt.

That will only solve part of the problem though, says Catherine Ruetschlin, an assistant economics professor at the University of Utah.

“The student debt crisis has two sides to it,” says Ruetschlin. “One side is, what do we do about debt that’s already accumulated that’s holding back the generation struggling with debt from making the large investments like household formation, kids, buying a home, saving for retirement. The second side is, how do we prevent future generations from dealing with this problem?”

In February 2018, Ruetschlin co-authored a study “The Macroeconomic Effects of Student Debt Cancellation,” that examined the effects of a one-time, federally funded cancelation of all outstanding student debt.

The study found that taking the current student debt total and pushing it back into the economy would lead to an “increased GDP by somewhere between 80 to 110 billion a year over the next 10 years,” as well as increased employment opportunities, with more than one million jobs being added to the economy every year. Circulating that debt back into the economy would create a “small stimulus” overall, Ruetschlin says, though it would likely be a dramatic and positive shift for those burdened by student loans.

But that doesn’t change the fact that current and future students will still need to borrow, the result in shifting societal attitudes that higher education benefits the individual more than overall society, and therefore should be funded by the individual.

“If we don’t have a major structural change,” Ruetschlin says, “we’ll find ourselves right back here.”

Many of the candidates have also proposed wholesale changes to the higher education system, including free college at public institutions.

Some voters aren’t convinced. Terri Moffit, a 45-year-old accounting assistant in Rialto, California, for example, thinks the burden should fall on her if her child wants to go to college.

When Moffit, who grew up in an economically depressed corner of Chino, graduated from high school almost 30 years ago, she looked around at family and friends struggling with college and vocational school debt and realized that “If I was going to go to college I was going to have to figure out how to make it happen.”

So Moffit skipped higher education, instead taking classes “here and there” that could help further her career. She’s carved out a nice life for herself, her husband and her son.

Moffit says she’s not necessarily against student loan forgiveness, but wonders if wiping out debt would deter borrowers from learning how to make good financial decisions.

Because she had no debt, it’s not a major factor in how she will vote. But she won’t completely ignore it either, Moffit says, because the person who gets elected in 2020 “may possibly get a second term, and they will be in office when it’s time for my kid to go to college.”

Moffit’s 12-year-old son, Isaac, has already expressed an interest in joining the military after college, a prospect Moffit isn’t wild about, but which could happen if she doesn’t save enough for Isaac to attend college. She doesn’t want him to take out loans and find himself like so many current borrowers, drowning in debt — especially because some of those borrowers don’t even have degrees.

According to the Urban Institute, among students who began college in 2011, 32% were no longer in school and had not earned a degree or certificate six years later; 27% of borrowers were in that situation.

It’s miserable, admits Kelsea Miller, 26, who attended Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, from 2011 to 2015 and came agonizingly close to graduating with a degree in human services. But when she failed her internship credit in the summer of 2015, Miller says couldn’t take out another loan to enroll in one more semester. Now, she’s sitting on $45,000 in debt without a degree to show for it. She’s been in deferment for five months.

“I didn’t grow up with money, so even $45,000, even though I know other people have it worse, it seems like so much to me, ugh,” says Miller, a freelance photographer and makeup artist. “This is what everyone did — you got loans and you went to school. And if you didn’t do that, you were a failure.”

Miller plans to vote and says student loans are a huge issue, along with healthcare. In her friend group student debt is “an open secret,” She hasn’t decided who she’ll support in the primary. She says she doesn’t pay attention to the news too closely, partially because it’s often depressing, and partially because she’s got other things on her mind.

Jasmine Turney can relate to that. Turney, 26, has $60,000 in student debt after attending Thiel College, a small liberal arts school in Greenville, Pennsylvania, and obtaining her undergraduate degree in criminal justice. Her debt has been a stumbling block since she graduated in 2012: She’s been engaged four years but can’t afford a wedding, and her monthly payment is so low (less than $100) that she assumes she’ll be saddled with debt forever.

Turney, who works at a nonprofit, didn’t vote in 2016, and she’s not sure if she’ll vote in 2020. She’s got so much else on her mind — like making sure she can pay bills — that she doesn’t have time to study candidates. She’s heard about the promises to fix America’s student loan crisis, of course. But she’s got major doubts.

“It seems so far-fetched to me, and too good to be true,” Turney says. “I’m $60,000 in debt and someone’s going to help? That doesn’t seem likely.”