Vox (8/7/23) should admit that student loan cancellation would be a costly policy for some of its writer’s funders.
Vox (8/7/23) published a piece arguing that “the White House should admit that student debt forgiveness isn’t happening,” and instead make sure that borrowers are prepared for loan repayments to begin again in October. But it failed to disclose that the author is on the student loan industry’s payroll.
The Debt Collective, the nation’s first debtor’s union, noted on Twitter (8/7/23) that the author, Kevin Carey, works for a corporate-backed think tank funded in part by the student loan industry, and has worked to undermine student debt cancellation for over a decade.
As a result, Carey’s argument that cancellation is futile, and that the White House’s efforts should be focused on helping students restart payments and avoid delinquency, reeks of feigned sympathy. It calls to mind the white moderate from MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” who despite claiming to support the civil rights movement, “paternalistically” advised African Americans to wait for a “more convenient season” to achieve them.
Don’t try to cancel
New America’s Kevin Carey
Carey praises the White House’s new income-driven repayment plan, but claims that in order to connect these services with the millions of borrowers who may not know their payments have restarted, the Biden Administration must end its flirtation with cancellation, which he argues diverts focus and represents a “confused” communications strategy.
Making sure borrowers know what their repayment options are is a worthy cause, but at no point does Carey provide any real evidence that these two goals are incongruous. Instead, the article is riddled with phrases emphasizing the need for an “all-out effort” and “relentless focus,” seemingly hoping to convince the reader through repetition that trying to cancel student debt would be a hopeless distraction.
In reality, given the current circumstances, an “all-out effort” to help student borrowers would look more like what the Biden administration is doing, and what borrowers and advocates say they want, and less like what the creditor shill is asking for. Hence the multi-faceted approach.
Carey states that the Debt Collective is “actively discouraging their many followers from enrolling in repayment plans.” This is false. Instead, what advocates like the Debt Collective object to is taking tools off the table that help borrowers, like cancellation, especially given the rarity of an administration open to canceling student debt.
Obvious conflict of interest
Washingtonian (6/24/18) reported that when New America’s Barry Lynn was organizing a conference on corporate concentration, his boss Anne-Marie Slaughter complained, “Just THINK how you are imperiling funding for others.”
Carey is vice president of “education policy and knowledge management” at New America, and director of the think tank’s Education Center. The group is noted for its coziness with its corporate sponsors (Washingtonian, 6/24/18)–once firing a researcher, Barry Lynn, after he publicly criticized Google, a major donor. “We’re an organization that develops relationships with funders,” CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter told staffers by way of explaining his termination.
As the Debt Collective highlighted on Twitter, another one of New America’s funders is the ECMC Foundation, the nonprofit branch of the Educational Credit Management Corporation–a debt collector for the Education Department. Another funder is the Lumina Foundation, whose deep pockets originate from the student loan industry.
That Carey’s job is funded by corporations that stand to lose so much from Biden’s cancellation of federal student loans deserves a disclosure from Vox. Instead, the closest readers get is Casey noting that when asked for comment, a loan cancellation activist told him to “shill for student loan companies elsewhere”—followed by his ludicrous rebuttal that student loan companies “haven’t made federal student loans since 2010.”
This is perhaps supposed to absolve Carey of having a vested interest in payments restarting. But this is not the same as saying that these corporations don’t make money off these loans, which they do when they collect them. ECMC in particular has a well-documented history of using “ruthless” tactics for collecting loans (New York Times, 1/1/14; Mother Jones, 8/23).
It’s no surprise, then, that the main thrust of Carey’s argument, that the White House cannot walk and chew gum at the same time—that it can’t both help student borrowers avoid delinquency when payments restart in October and pursue its Plan B strategy to get debt cancellation through the Supreme Court—is exactly what ECMC and Lumina would be hoping for.
To not only neglect to disclose this obvious conflict of interest but to instead obfuscate and pretend it couldn’t exist—all in the name of preventing student borrowers from much needed relief—is a failure of the highest order. As the Debt Collective tweeted, “Kevin Carey knows who butters his bread, and he writes as ‘a student loan expert’ for Vox promoting the status quo.”
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Surprise !! Better question is WHO isn’t bought and paid for. Really now, no one is pure (including FAIR). Lets get real.
Who has bought FAIR? According to its own site, it is what we in the UK call a charity which is sustained only by contributions from the public. Is that corrupt?
College was cheap in the 80s—- I paid around $1,000 to a state University in Northern CA. for a B.A. and teaching credentialI guess by the 90-s rates started to climb. Reading now I see that that people owe $50,000 and up for a degree?
What happened America?
College was reasonable decades ago. For instance, its been reported that Penn State’s University Park campus was the most expensive state flagship in the 2021-22 school year for in-state freshmen, even after accounting, for scholarships. Those students paid an average $26,747 in tuition, fees, room and board, according to Education Department data. It was also reported that the school received far more new tuition revenue than it lost in state support over the past two decades. College costs are way out of control and have been for quite sometime.
What happened is the same here in the UK: the Professional Managerial Class didn’t like so many of the working class entering higher education and learning how the world works for the PMC at the expense of the working class. So access to higher education had to be drastically cut back to where it always was before the extremely brief window of wider opportunities. Go to, say, Cuba and you’ll find – despite the horrors of the US sanctions – a government and people jointly committed to the ideal of higher education for all who need it.
“Education in Cuba has been a highly ranked system for many years. The University of Havana was founded in 1727 and there are a number of other well-established colleges and universities. Following the 1959 revolution, the Castro government nationalized all educational institutions, and created a government operated system. Education expenditures continue to receive high priority.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Cuba
Cuba, huh ? You do know the facts don’t support your apparent love of that country. Fact – Mexico’s government registered a monthly record of more than 58,000 Cuban migrants heading to the U.S. this past June, the latest month of available estimates, which is a 45% increase from May. In Cuba, social-media advertisements have recently increased offering door-to-door transportation to the U.S. through flights to Nicaragua and ground travel across Central America and Mexico. The prior Havana to Managua air bridge has all but ceased after the Biden administration introduced a program of sponsors for Cuban migrants. Arturo McFields, the former senior Nicaraguan diplomat based in Washington who defected last year, said many Cubans aren’t waiting to find sponsors and are selling all they own to escape the island’s worst economic crisis in more than three decades.
Yea, that 1959 revolution was a long, long time ago. Some people just get stuck in time.
I wonder why there is an economic crisis in a country, neighbouring the USA, which has been under deliberately cruel economic sanctions by the USA since 1962? Could there be a correlation there, perhaps?
As for the USA: the above article is about the horrendous cost of higher education, which you didn’t bother addressing. Such education is, sensibly, made much more freely available in Cuba, making the populace better educated than their counterparts in the USA. Perhaps you, like the US government, thinks higher education is not for the working class who are fit only for manual labour and creating wealth for the elite.
But wait …. If everyone that desires opportunity and betterment, runs away (to the United States !!) at the first chance, what does a cheap higher education have to do with it ????
Come October I give up and join the masses of tents. I’ve decided
My “polite” comment to Vox:
Reference: Vox’s Student Loan ‘Expert’ Is Paid by Debt Collectors
Your editorial regarding student loan forgiveness makes you a front runner for Rupert Murdock’s annual Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing Award. Congratulations.