Meet a Gen Xer with $230,000 in student debt who worries payments will restart without Biden's loan forgiveness: 'It will be an excuse to say they'd done all they can'
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- Timothy Babulski, 44, has $230,000 in student debt, so Biden's relief will hardly impact him.
- But he says payments restarting before the relief is implemented means "the majority of borrowers will be abandoned."
- Biden's student-loan forgiveness currently sits in the Supreme Court, awaiting a judgment on its legality.
Timothy Babulski knows that $10,000 in student-debt relief will hardly make a dent in his $230,000 balance.
But for the sake of millions of other borrowers dealing with debt loads, he hopes reductions to their balances will happen before they are thrown back into repayment.
As an adjunct professor in Maine, Babulski, 44, pursued two advanced degrees because he said it was the only way for him to progress in his teaching career. He received his Ph.D in 2017, but during the three and a half years it took to get that degree, his loans were in in-school deferment, meaning he did not have to make any payments but the interest on them continued to grow.
While Babulski's employer would be eligible for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, which forgives student debt for government and nonprofit workers after ten years of qualifying payments, the program's initial rules did not allow adjunct work to qualify since it was part-time.
The Education Department announced proposals in October to permanently reform PSLF, including by establishing full-time employment as 30 hours a week and requiring employers to give adjunct faculty credit of at least 3.35 hours of work for every hour taught. Babulski is hoping he will be able to take advantage of those changes once they are implemented. But with the up to $20,000 in broad debt relief Biden announced at the end August currently held up in court, Babulski said he's worried with how the Biden administration will handle the outcome.
"My fear, regardless of the outcome of the case, is that the White House is so desperate to restart payments and get back to normal that they've forgotten that 'normal' is a decades-long debt sentence; either way, it will be an excuse to say they'd done all the can," he said. "The only difference will be whether the majority of borrowers will be abandoned— or all of us will be."
"It's a system that has historically failed us for half a century"
Biden's goal when he announced broad student-debt relief was to help millions of borrowers recover from the pandemic and ensure they would not be forced to enter repayment in a worse-off position than they were before COVID-19.
Biden's administration has used the HEROES Act of 2003 to carry out this relief, which gives the Education Secretary the ability to waive or modify student-loan balances in connection with a national emergency, like COVID-19. This is "one-time" debt relief, as Biden has frequently noted, and he maintains confidence that the Supreme Court will rule in his favor when it hears arguments to the cases beginning on February 28.
The Education Department also used the HEROES Act to recently extend the student-loan payment pause through June 30, or whenever the lawsuits are resolved, whichever comes first — meaning that borrowers might still have to resume paying off their debt if the Supreme Court ends up striking down Biden's policy
But the administration has not publicly noted what it will do, if anything, if the Supreme Court strikes down the broad debt relief. That has Babulski concerned.
"It's a system that has historically failed us for half a century," Babulski said.
"We have no other options in our society to pay for that education other than debt," he continued. "That's how it has to be done. It's people who come from money versus people who don't."
While many Republican lawmakers have criticized Biden's debt relief, arguing it would cost taxpayers and benefit the wealthy, the $125,000 income cap the president placed on his loan forgiveness was intended to ensure it would benefit the lower earners.
As Insider previously reported, some Democratic lawmakers and advocates have been urging Biden to use the Higher Education Act of 1965, rather than the HEROES Act, to cancel student debt. It does not rely on the existence of a national emergency. Experts at the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School wrote in a 2020 memo that under the Higher Education Act, the "Secretary has the authority to modify a loan to zero, and exercises this authority even in the absence of any implementing regulations."
Babulski just hopes the focus on resuming payments doesn't take away from the Biden administration's promise of taking some of the student debt burden off the shoulders of borrowers.
"We should want to have that feel good story for everyone," Babulski said. "The important amount isn't the amount of debt that is canceled. It's having no debt at the end. The ambition of my generation, the millennial generation, isn't even to get ahead. It's just to get to zero."
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