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Eric Fitts has been an educator in the US public schools system his whole working life. A single dad of two teenage boys, the 50-year-old worked his way from teacher to award-winning principal, to his current role as senior executive school leadership coach at Wake County public schools district, a 160,000 pupil catchment area in North Carolina.
However, like millions of Americans, despite his decades of career success, Fitts was saddled for years with tens of thousands of dollars in student debt. That is, until the Biden administration’s efforts to forgive student loan debt resulted in his payments burden ceasing as of October 2023.
“I was worried about what I could do for my kids because I had $1,000 [monthly] payments,” Fitts explains of how they took a huge chunk out of his paycheck. “That is so limiting.” The debt forgiveness was a “complete game changer,” he says. Without debt cancellation, Fitts estimates he would be paying the sum off for another 20 years.
“It’s a level of security to build and establish,” he says of his change of circumstances. “I’m saving. I’m investing. It’s about the future. Student loan debt is about the past.”
At last the family has a chance to buy a house and he can put money aside for his kids’ to go to college instead of cash being sucked up by loan repayments.
All of these things weren’t on the table before and now they are. And that’s the beautiful thing – for me to have my kids to be able to see that
Eric Fitts, educator
Cancelling and relieving student debt for low and middle income borrowers along with public sector workers has been a keystone of the Biden-Harris administration.
With the federal student loan debt reaching $1.6 trillion in 2024 and 46 million Americans estimated to be impacted, the administration’s bids to erase debt have proven popular with the public.
Nevertheless setbacks, including the right wing dominated Supreme Court in June 2023 blocking early attempts to roll out the initiative as well as Republican rebuffs from congress, have come thick and fast.
With the final days of the 2024 election campaign mired in multiple attention-grabbing stunts such as Trump’s fascist rally in Madison Square Garden, as well as spectacle and misinformation distracting from policy, moves on student debt relief that could provide a potential vote-getting lever for Kamala Harris in her pitch for the presidency have instead been overshadowed.
The Biden administration’s latest steps via the Department of Education to alleviate the strain of student debt by targeting around eight million people dealing with financial hardship from other sources such as health care bills announced on 25 October, barely registered as a blip in the news cycle.
Student debt relief could be a metaphor for the broader Biden legacy. Despite billions being poured into Democratic Party campaigning and messaging, the American public still don’t appear to be fully aware of a crucial thing: the significant and ongoing impact of the Biden administration’s era-defining domestic and economic policies.
Regardless of unprecedented economic achievements, not least the strongest pandemic recovery of the G7 countries as measured by GDP, somehow the positive narrative has been drowned out in the vortex of political cognitive dissonance, including voters rating Trump higher on the economy. Ingrained negative public opinion about Biden’s performance since taking office in January 2021 hasn’t helped and, even with record jobs growth, voters are focused more on inflation.
With unemployment rates historically low and wages growing faster than inflation since the pandemic began, the disconnect with public opinion on the economy is all the more stark.
As a recent report from The Center for American Progress (CAP) put it: “The economy in 2024 is stronger than experts had predicted it would be in 2024 before COVID-19 even happened. And it is stronger now than it was projected to be by 2024 at the beginning of the Biden-Harris administration.”
Bobby Kogan, a former Biden White House adviser and currently senior director for federal budget policy at CAP and a co-author of the report, says the federal government’s “proactive approach” post-pandemic helped deliver the US’s outperformance of other G7 countries on growth, adding that when it comes to earnings, the bottom 10% of workers experienced the highest “real wages gains”.
Millions more people still need help but the current administration has nevertheless been “the most ambitious in my lifetime,” he adds.