The Build Back Better Act passed last month in the House of Representatives contains significant investments in higher education, including billions in support for historically black colleges and universities and a new fund to help college students complete their degrees. However, some of President Biden’s key priorities were dropped from the bill, including making community college tuition-free for all. You’re the country’s top official on higher education policy.
I know that he fought very hard [for free community college] and if there were something he could do to get it in the package, it would be in the package. That said, this idea has come a tremendous distance since people started talking about it six years ago.
RR: Some progressives are also disappointed that Congress didn’t take action to cancel student-loan debt. Is the administration considering doing more on its own?
JK: Well, we’ve done quite a bit already. There are people who are already eligible for debt cancellation — whether because they were cheated by their college, or they had a permanent disability, or they’re in a public service job — and yet often are not getting it. So we’ve focused on making sure borrowers are getting the benefits that they’re entitled to. So far, we’ve completely canceled the debts of more than 600,000 students. There are tens of thousands more who believe they were cheated by their college and have applied for their loans to be discharged. We are working through that as quickly as we can. We are working to permanently expand public-service loan forgiveness; we’re also making income-driven repayment, which ensures that loan payments are an affordable share of borrowers’ income, more generous and as easy as possible to use. So there’s quite a bit we’re doing on all fronts.
JK: I’m not in a position to rule it in or rule it out. It’s something about which conversations are still going on, including the legal aspects of our authority to do this.
RR: You previously worked in the Obama administration as a senior policy adviser, dealing with the impact of the 2008 financial crisis and recession on higher education. Can you compare your experience in that crisis with what we’re facing today?
JK: The 2009 recession was obviously a very scary time. The economy was shedding jobs.
Those of us working on higher education policy were trying to help people get the skills that they would need to go into better jobs when the jobs came back.h
The situation we’re in right now is quite different. For one, enrollment has fallen, instead of grown. So with enrollment down 700,000 students, we’re asking, how do we make sure this interruption is not a permanent scar on our country’s educational attainment? How do we get those people back on the pathway? There’s also a real sense that something has changed permanently. We’re not going to go back to the way things were in 2019. We’re going forward to something different. There are going to be a lot of aspects to that.
Finally, students have lost learning time. They face mental health challenges. So we need to build institutions a little differently to meet what students’ needs are going to be instead of what they were.
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