Biden said on the campaign trail that if elected, he’d seek to «immediately» wipe out at least $10,000 in student debt for every federal borrower, a move that advocates say is in his authority. But over a year into his presidency, Biden has failed to deliver on that pledge, leaving borrowers like Rob frustrated.
«I know that I’m going to have to start making payments,» Rob, who’s studying to become a teacher and did not want to disclose his full name for privacy reasons, told Insider. «Teachers don’t make a lot, and it’s going to have a big impact on me, already just on my quality of life.»
The treatment group consists of traditional students-those who entered college immediately or very soon after high school and attended a public 4-year university. Care should be taken when extrapolating our results to the general population, which includes many individuals who enrolled in a private or public 2-year university or who first attended college later in life. If such individuals respond to debt much differently than traditional students, we do not capture this heterogeneity of treatment effect in our estimates.
The sample is all individuals from a nationally representative cohort of 2331-year-old individuals with credit records in 2004 after applying the filters described in sec
D. Instrumental Variable Estimation Results
First-stage results from regressing student debt on the instrument and other controls are presented in Table 3. Across specifications, a $1,000 increase in the sum of average tuition across the 4 years after the individual turned 18 is associated with an approximately $150 increase in student loan debt for students in the treatment group. The estimates are strongly statistically significant, with F-statistics far exceeding typical rule-of-thumb thresholds for linear models in all our specifications except column 1 (which does not include any control variables) and column 7 (which drops anyone who did not attend college from the control group). For reference, after controlling for state and cohort fixed effects, the residual of the 4-year sum of in-state tuition has a standard deviation of $915 across our sample.
The sample is all individuals from a nationally representative cohort of 2331-year-old individuals with credit records in 2004 after applying the filters described in sec
