Student Loans Are No Longer Taboo

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

62% :What to Know About Student Loan Debt ReliefCard 1 of 5Many will benefit.
57% : She owed more than $130,000 in student loans, and the interest was compounding faster than she could keep up.
57% : "I'm happy that topics that were once touchy, including student loans, are very normalized now."
55% : "That's when I started digging into student loans, and the more I learned, the more I realized that other people could relate."
55% : "Because it's been in the news a lot, my parents have become way more understanding about where I'm at financially," said Lauren Howey, 39, a teacher in Greenwood, Ind., who owes about $25,000 in student loans.
54% : Is it in the budget?'"Conversations about student debt have come a long way in the past few years.
54% : "Student loans have become a hot topic in the last few years, and it's been important for me to share my story to try to help educate people," she said.
53% : Destigmatizing student loans doesn't just make people feel better; it can actually help them tackle their balances.
49% : "I began to feel more empowered talking about money in 2020, and I think that was partly to do with the movement for racial justice, and how that spilled over into other groups finally feeling like they could speak up for themselves," said Brian Vu, 32, an opera singer who lives in Orange County, Calif., and graduated from college with more than $50,000 in student debt.
48% : Millennials, the generation most likely to have student debt, have challenged taboos against talking about finances; some surveys have shown that they are more likely to bring up money with friends, co-workers, even strangers on social media.
46% : "When I started talking to people about their student loans in 2016, a lot of people felt guilty about them," said Travis Hornsby, who founded Student Loan Planner, a service that helps people with student debt strategize their repayments, after seeing his wife struggle with six figures of debt from medical school.
45% : If you received a Pell Grant and meet these income requirements, you could qualify for an extra $10,000 in debt cancellation.
43% : "Debt forgiveness may be controversial, but I think everyone can agree that the system of student loans is broken," he said.
41% : "I worry that people will conclude that student loans are bad across the board, and they might really miss out on opportunities as a result," said Stuart Heckman, an associate professor of financial planning at Kansas State University who researches attitudes toward student debt.
39% : Individuals who are single and earn $125,000 or less will qualify for the $10,000 in debt cancellation.
37% :A New Way of Looking at LoansMany Americans have also come to see student loan debt as a structural problem, rather than a result of poor personal decisions.
32% :More on Student Loan Debt ReliefA Hard Sell: At the White House and aboard Air Force One, advocates of debt cancellation made a sustained push to win over President Biden.
29% : "It's concerning if people are turning away from college altogether, just because they hear a lot of horror stories about how student loans are terrible and crushing.

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