I’m the target audience for Biden’s student loan relief. It helps me, and that’s fair

I was well-equipped for the cost of my undergraduate degree. I opted to attend an in-state school, UNC-Chapel Hill, and graduate school has never been a necessity for me. My family saved the equivalent of around two years of tuition from my birth to the day I graduated high school. I got two four-year scholarships that were small, but helpful. Even with these advantages, I had to take out student loans.

Right now, I owe more than $29,000 to the federal government. That’s considerably less than the average student loan debt in North Carolina, which is around $38,000. My dad is helping me, but the sheer amount is a lot to wrap my head around. It’s a lot of money, which I didn’t consider at 18. It’s a lot of money for a career that doesn’t make much, for a piece of paper and an education that felt required of me.

On Wednesday, Joe Biden signed an executive order eliminating $10,000 in student loan debt for those of us making less than $125,000, or $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients, the majority of federal borrowers.

It’s a big deal for me and my family, and for other people who are staring down loans. It doesn’t wipe my loans away completely — once payments resume in 2023 and with the new 5% income cap on undergraduate loans, I’d owe around $290 a month for a little more than five years to pay off the rest of it. Before Biden’s announcement, I owed $312.50 a month for 10 years. I only took out $26,000, but would have paid $37,500, on top of my family’s savings and my scholarships.

The $10K can help me with a down payment on a house. It can help me pay off my car. It’s the start of grad school, it’s a wedding, it’s opportunity.

There are still a lot of details we don’t know: is it a blanket forgiveness, or will we have to apply for it? Will borrowers need to refinance their loans? Is it $10,000 across the board, or is it “up to” $10,000 per borrower as previously stated?

But it is a start, and it’s one that will help a lot of North Carolinians. In 2021, there were around 280,100 borrowers in North Carolina with federal direct or indirect loans in an income-driven payment plan. We collectively owe $17.4 billion to the federal government. Including private loans, those numbers are closer to 1.3 million North Carolinians and $48 billion owed, averaging out to more than $38,000 per person.

Private loans aren’t included in Biden’s plan, even though those are burdening more North Carolinians. It also, quite frankly, could be more. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Raphael Warnock have pushed for up to $50,000 forgiven per borrower. This is more than I need; it’s also something that would wipe out debt for three-quarters of student loan borrowers in the country and address the reality that Black student loan borrowers owe more than $50,000 on average.

The argument against any student debt forgiveness is that other people had to pay their way, and it’s about what’s fair. But the reality isn’t fair. UNC-CH’s tuition cost $480 the year my parents started college. If the costs had only risen with inflation, my tuition would have been $1,042.

Instead, it was more than six times that, and that doesn’t include the costs that also have gone up through the years: the price of housing, the price of a laptop, the price of a meal plan, the price of gas (which I needed to drive to class reporting assignments). Again, this didn’t feel optional for my generation of students: almost half of all jobs in the United States require a bachelor’s degree, at minimum.

There is so much more that could be done to address the rising cost of education in the United States, more than $10,000 can cover. My parents and I did everything we could. This news makes those decisions feel like the right ones.

Sara Pequeño is an Opinion writer and member of the Editorial Board.