Student-loan borrowers can likely count on more debt cancellation if Kamala Harris wins the presidency
Kamala Harris has backed several key student-loan forgiveness efforts during her career.
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- Vice President Kamala Harris is a frontrunner for the Democratic nominee for president.
- Through her work as California's attorney general and VP, Harris has a record of helping student-loan borrowers.
- She championed debt relief for borrowers who attended predatory for-profit schools.
President Joe Biden is officially out of the 2024 presidential race, and he gave his full support to his vice president, Kamala Harris. This could be good news for student-loan borrowers looking for relief.
On Sunday afternoon, Biden announced he would not be seeking reelection following weeks of pressure from members within his own party urging him to drop out.
His endorsement of Harris now gives Americans a glimpse into what the next four years could look like should she win. During her work as California's attorney general, a 2020 presidential candidate, and her term as vice president, she stood behind a range of higher education policies, including student-debt relief.
When she served as California's attorney general in 2013, Harris led an investigation into Corinthian College campuses in the state, a now-defunct for-profit chain. She accused the schools of misrepresenting the value of their programs and loading students up with debt they could not afford to pay off. In 2016, she won $1 billion in relief for borrowers who went to the schools.
She continued that work in 2022 — Biden's Education Department announced $5.8 billion in debt cancellation for all remaining borrowers defrauded by Corinthian, the biggest group discharge the department had carried out at the time.
Harris has continued to tout her record of helping borrowers; in 2023, following the approval of an additional $39 billion in debt relief for 804,000 borrowers on income-driven repayment plans, she said in a statement that "reducing student loan debt has been a priority throughout my career."
"Our Administration will continue to fight to make sure Americans can access high-quality postsecondary education without taking on the burden of unmanageable student loan debt," she said.
When it comes to broader student-loan forgiveness, Harris has stood behind Biden's efforts to cancel student debt. In 2022, before Biden announced his first plan to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt for borrowers that the Supreme Court ultimately struck down, Politico reported that Harris privately advocated for additional relief as Biden expressed doubts about its scale.
Biden's administration is now working toward a second attempt at broader student-loan forgiveness, which is expected to benefit over 30 million borrowers. The plan includes canceling up to $20,000 in unpaid interest along with relief for borrowers who have been in repayment for at least 20 years.
Harris has publicly backed that plan. However, when she was running for president in the 2020 election, her plan for debt relief was criticized for being too complicated: she proposed loan forgiveness for Pell Grant recipients who started businesses in disadvantaged communities.
Harris's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider on the higher education and student-loan forgiveness policies she might prioritize as a candidate.
Beyond student-loan forgiveness, Harris has also vouched for free college and supported Sen. Bernie Sanders's College for All Act, which would make tuition free for students at community colleges and four-year public institutions making up to $125,000 a year.