UW–Madison’s Nicholas Hillman was recently interviewed by Marketplace for a report that is headlined, “What would happen if everyone just stopped paying their student debt?”
The Marketplace report looks at President Joe Biden’s debt cancellation plan, and discusses the issue of student debt with professionals from across the country.
“Our student loan repayment system has been shut off for three years and it’s already a pretty rusty machine in the first place,” Hillman, a professor in the School of Education’s Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis, tells Marketplace. Hillman also is the director of UW–Madison’s Student Success Through Applied Research (SSTAR) lab and is an expert on how finance, policy, and geography shape educational opportunities in the United States.
Hillman adds that Biden’s plan “would really help a lot of truly struggling borrowers who have really no other form of relief.”
“If everyone stopped trying to pay down the nation’s $1.8 trillion in student debt, it’s tough to predict where any extra funds people have would go.” Hillman states. “But perhaps that money would go toward retirement savings or homeownership — or maybe just expenses that people need to get by in their everyday lives.”
He continues: “The cost of attending college is so high, and oftentimes, it’s the non-tuition expenses. For example, room and board. It’s just expensive to live in America. Even if everybody says, ‘I’m not paying ever again,’ it doesn’t change those underlying structures.”
Read the full Marketplace story. Marketplace is part of American Public Media, one of the largest producers of public radio programming in the world.