When the Repayment Pause Ends, the Strike Will Begin

After two years, the Biden administration has officially announced the end of the pandemic-related federal student loan repayment pause in January 2023. But while some borrowers will resume their monthly payments, others will take a different action, hoping to affect broader change in higher education funding with a national student debt strike.

The Debt Collective, a debtors union working to cancel education and healthcare debts, successfully executed a student debt strike in 2015 that led to the cancellation of $5.8 billion of debt accrued by students attending a predatory, for-profit institution. With this next strike, the Debt Collective hopes to influence the federal government to cancel all remaining student debt.

Two weeks ago,  the Biden administration issued student debt cancellation of $10,000 for individuals earning under $125,000, and up to $20,000 for those who received Pell Grants to pursue their education. But activists and scholars say that, while this latest wave of forgiveness was a step in the right direction, total cancellation is the best option to confront the exponential impact student debt has had on Black communities, marginalized groups, and those from low-income backgrounds.

Dr. Jonathan C. W. Davis, director of research at the Equity Research Cooperative (EQRC).“The end goal of any strike, particularly this strike, is to raise awareness about the issue, to galvanize support. We don’t get to $1.7 trillion in student loan debt as a nation by individual level actions of borrowers—this is a fundamental systems issue,” said Dr. Jonathan C. W. Davis, director of research at the Equity Research Cooperative (EQRC), a non-profit that works to advance the social, economic, and political goals of communities of color through research and financial redistribution. “The debt strike is that stop-gap that people are going to and need to use to protect themselves, keep money in their pockets, and live lives that everyone would hope for: having food, shelter, and affording basic necessities.”

Davis is a co-author of the 2020 Education Trust’s report, Jim Crow Debt: How Black Borrowers Experience Student Loans, which surveyed almost 1,300 Black graduates to gather data on how student loans impacted their lives and perspectives.

“I think about Black borrowers as canaries in the coal mine when it comes to student debt. Black borrowers borrow more on average, default at higher rates, and take longer to pay off their loans,” due to racial discrimination experienced in the job market and a lack of generational wealth, said Davis. “We’ve structured higher education and debt financing that’s felt and experienced the worst by Black borrowers. So, if we think about setting up solutions to this system, we have to center those most impacted.”

The crux of the upcoming strike’s action is to help striking borrowers owe $0 a month. To do this, the Debt Collective suggests various methods, including submitting a Borrower Defense Claim. Once submitted, the borrower is placed in administrative forbearance while their request is reviewed. Another option is applying for Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF). The Biden administration’s PSLF waiver, designed to give more borrowers access to PSLF forgiveness, expires on October 31.