 Alright, so I'm going to just do a high-level overview of my chapter. There's lots of good data points in there that I think you should read and get into them. So first, I think when we're talking about millennials and student debt, we have to really think about some important context and trends that millennials have experienced, especially when experiencing student debt. So since the 1999-2000 academic year, we've seen a 68% increase in the net price of a four-year degree at a public university. Since that same time, total loans borrowed annually for higher ed has doubled. And not only is it increasing in cost, more people are attending, which is for good reasons. But so we've seen undergraduate enrollment has increased 37% from 2000-2010 at the height of the recession. The number has fallen slightly, but it's of course well above the 2000 levels. That's a 73% increase since the 1980s. We've also seen that graduate school enrollment has also increased 36% in that time. It's actually continued to increase, I think, at around or rate about 3%. Of course, you know, those are more expensive degrees adding on to the debt. So headlines, of course, will feature lots of times, you know, students with high debt loads often exceeding six figures. But the typical borrower is not at that level. Total loans have actually really strict limits that don't allow most graduates to get to those six-figure levels. So we see here the median graduate, in 2016, academic year for bachelor's degree had $27,000 in student loan debt, and $14,000 at the associate degree level. And that's of course an increase since the 2003-2004 academic year, which is about, you know, we've talked about this is a large time span of, you know, a generation that picture can look very different depending on when that person graduated or experienced higher ed. But what it actually happens is that it's the graduate degrees that are often those high-dollar student loan borrowers. But only one graduate degree level, it surpasses at the median graduate $100,000. And that's going to be our professional doctorates. So our MDs, our JDs, dentists, you know, often people who end up earning six-figure salaries who can afford to repay their debt. Of course, there's exceptions to that, but, you know, the highest borrowers on average are not people who are struggling. At the PhD and master's levels, there, the median debt is about $55,000 and just under $50,000, respectively. And all of those numbers that I just mentioned include undergraduate debt. So, but of course, when we're talking about this perspective, we should remember the point I just mentioned is that more people have enrolled in graduate school, so of course, increasing their debt. But I would say that most of that growth has been at the master's degree level. So when we talk about the cumulative $1.6 trillion debt and paint it as the dire picture of a student debt crisis, I think sometimes that misses just like that six-figure borrower. It misses some really important, but smaller, significant crises. And so I'm just going to do that really quickly. These four, what I would consider the really big problems. So first is noncompleters. We just, you know, we, students who enroll in school but don't graduate are three times as likely to default on their loans. We have a stratified system of higher ed with varying levels of quality. Many colleges and universities would be labeled as dropout factories if they were at K-12 school because they have abysmal graduation rates. On average, a college degree pays off, but only if you graduate. So like I said, the three times is likely to default if you don't complete. And 65% of those who have defaulted have a loan balance under $10,000. So that's because they enrolled for a short time, borrowed to do so, but left with no degree. So they struggle to repay because when they enter the labor force, they have, you know, debt, but no degree or credential to show for it. And they don't see that earnings premium that a college degree affords. And this plays out across the other crises. So of course, as mentioned, when we're talking about wealth gaps, it's really important to remember that we have significant racial wealth gaps stemming from historic racism and the legacy of slavery. And of course, that plays out in student debt. Black students are more likely to borrow at a rate nearly 17 percentage points higher than white students. And when they do borrow, they borrow more. And students of color often attend schools with lower graduation rates. Often they are attending community colleges or, you know, historically black colleges, universities, which are under resource and struggle to provide needed supports for those students. And of course, sometimes that also increases the price of which students are paying and borrowing. But when they do graduate, black students face a discriminatory and racist labor market that pays them less. There's a logical connection, of course, between borrowing more and making less and defaulting on your loans. So research shows as the mortgage rate was really troubling for black graduates, this is worse for me. A black graduate with a bachelor's degree is more likely to default on our loans than a white student who dropped out, which given what I just said about noncompleters, that should be really, really troubling. Next is low-income students. They face many of the same struggles of borrowers of color. And of course, many of them are also borrowers of color. They hire rates to attend college. They borrow more, pointing to the fact that need-based aid hasn't kept up with the rising cost of college. And they also often attend under-resourced community colleges or regional institutions that cost more and aren't able to provide those supports. On average, they're less likely to graduate than their low-income peers. And at some schools, the disparity there is massive. And of course, all of this inhibits them from building wealth, like a college degree should allow them to do. Lastly, something that impacts all of those things is for-profit schools. So the rise of the for-profit higher education sector has contributed significantly to the rise in student debt. They're more expensive, loading students up with more debt, but they're also often worse quality. So they have significantly lower graduation rates than public or private non-profit schools. And beyond graduation rates, so while for-profit sector accounts for a tenth of all students, they account for half of all defaults. So it's also just rife with other problems. Beyond poor graduation rates, they have defrauded students by misrepresenting job placement rates. They've been predatory in their recruiting practices, targeting low-income and black students as well as veterans. And they've often operated with unstable finances, which put them in a place where they just shut down, leaving students in the lurch. And just as enrollment increased during the Great Recession, broadly, this sector exploded during that time, partially because of online education. But they doubled their undergraduate enrollment during those six years. And that is it. So thank you, and I'll turn it over to Brent. My name is Brent Cohen. I'm the Executive Director at Generation Progress. Honored to be here today and to talk about the chapter that we co-wrote with my colleague Charlotte Hancock as a co-author, as well as Ben Miller and Colleen Campbell at the Center for American Progress. Generation Progress works with and for young people to advance solutions to the most pressing problems facing our nation and our generations. And we are the only youth organizing entity nationally that we know of that's housed within a think tank over at the Center for American Progress. Let's talk just a little bit about the scope of the issues that we have. And some of the, we laid out four solutions in the paper and really provided a menu of options for policy makers to think about. Although, to be quite frank, having, sitting here and listening to just the extent of the wealth gap and the extent of the problems facing millennials as a 35-year-old with more than six figures in student loan debt myself. I don't see how bold solutions, such as some form of debt cancellation, isn't part of the conversation going forward. And I think it's really critical that whatever type of bold solution there is going forward be paired with massive solutions to college affordability so that we're not in the same cycle 20 years from now. But we need to address college affordability and also address the ways in which the system has failed our generation over the past 15, 20 years as you've seen here through the myriad of data. So what exactly is the extent of the problem? 43 million Americans collectively owe 1.5 trillion in federal student loan debt. And that debt is especially concentrated among young adults. One in three, roughly, of all adults ages 25 to 34 have some form of student loan debt. So we're talking about one in three people. Our generation was told that going to college is how you achieve the American dream, it is how you ascend into middle class or upper middle class or beyond, it was the pathway we were told. And what we've seen from all of the data today, instead we've been saddled with hundreds or sometimes thousands or sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt, which isn't just the impact of having to pay that but also what you're not able to do because of that. Home ownership, retirement savings, daycare costs. As millennials in particular, certainly we know people of all ages have children but as millennials are going into their mid to late 20s, mid to late 30s, many of us have children. And so the matching of childcare costs with student loan debt costs and in some cases also elder costs as people take care of families. You're seeing the convergence of these types of debt all at once or these types of really basic levels of responsibility on the financial side. And so things like owning a home or saving for retirement become extremely difficult or impossible. Graduate student debt I think is often, we heard a little bit about it today, is often left out of the conversation. But it's also an important element of this broader crisis, particularly acute for people of color. We've heard about the intergenerational wealth gap. We've heard that as incomes, the gap may be less, but the wealth gap remains. Part of the reason is because of the Wesley discussed the racism that is found often in the job market. Part of that, what that means is that people of color need extra levels of degrees for the same level of job. Not because they can't perform it, but because they won't be hired. What that means also is that many times borrowers of color have higher level of debt to repay because of those master's degrees and other graduate degrees. And it also prevents wealth accumulation. So whereas white student loan borrowers may have parents who can help them with rent or help them with a down payment on a house, oftentimes because of the history of racism, systemic discrimination in this country, borrowers of color do not have that same level of access. So as I said, we put together a policy of menu options and I should probably start talking about that given my time. So we approached the policy options with four main goals in mind. Equity, simplicity, broad impact, and meaningful relief. We heard a bit about borrowers who do not complete college and how critical that is, especially knowing that borrowers who do not complete college don't receive the bump in income on the back end but are still saddled with student loan debt. We've heard quite a bit about black or african-american borrowers, showing that the typical black or african-american borrower had made no progress paying down their loans within 12 years of entering college. And nearly half had defaulted. Borrowers were dependent. So these are oftentimes borrowers, students with children. Student parents make up 27% of all undergraduates who default on their federal loans, and roughly two thirds are single parents. And then finally, Pell Grant recipients. These were folks who were never supposed to have to borrow to go to college. Pell grants and Pell Grant recipients were supposed to be able to go to college, largely financed by the government, and that simply hasn't happened. And we've seen that roughly 90% of individuals who default within 12 years of entering college received a Pell Grant at some point in life. Simplicity, the best plans in the world are meaningless if people can't access them. Broad impact, we want to reach as many people as possible, so we can have the greatest generational impact possible. And finally, meaningful relief. It doesn't really matter if it doesn't feel like it matters. So those were the broad sort of policy goals we had in mind. Now, possible solutions, and again, we laid these out as a menu of options. We did not make a specific recommendation. The first broadly is to forgive all student loan debt. This one's pretty basic, $1.5 trillion. Forgive it, I should say cancel is might even be the preferred term here. Cancel the student loan debt for everyone who has it. There are some equity implications, but certainly as broad relief, certainly as impactful and meaningful. The second is to forgive a set dollar amount for all borrowers. So the federal government, for example, could forgive up to $10,000 or up to $25,000 or up to $50,000 or up to $60,000. This means that some people's debt would be entirely wiped out. Particularly for those with lower levels of student debt, $10,000, $15,000. We often know low income borrowers are disproportionately represented with low balances and disproportionately likely to go into default. So from an equity standpoint, even cancelling $10,000 or $15,000 or $20,000 of debt across the board has huge equity implications and really help out those most at need. Going further up is also particularly important as we know black and African-American borrowers actually are likely to borrow more money than their white peers and so between $20,000 and $60,000. So there are also equity implications there on the positive side. This is just a very brief chart that sort of lays out. As you increase the forgiveness amount from $5,000 to $60,000, an estimate as to how much this canceled debt would quote unquote cost. $207 billion up to $1065 billion, far less than the $1.5 trillion, I would point out, still significant. But as you look at the right column, the percentage of borrowers whose full debt would be eliminated. At a $60,000 cancellation, you're seeing 86% of student loan borrowers having their debt fully canceled. There are the two other options that we discussed in the paper are not about student loan debt cancellation but are around repayment options to tackle excessive interest growth. So the income based repayment plans were a very positive addition to student loan repayment to really acknowledge the fact that many student loan borrowers aren't able to pay the high levels of student debt. And being able to target it and tailor it to 10% of their income was one way to address this. The downside of current income based repayment plans is that interest continues to accumulate. So as you pay less money or for some people pay $0 per month, but are still in repayment, interest is accumulating, meaning your total debt is going up. If you want to talk about demoralizing, paying as much as you possibly can in seeing your debt go up instead of down is demoralizing. So one of our plans here would eliminate debt accumulation for people who are income based repayment plans and also lower the number of years from 20 down to 10, excuse me, 15 or 20, depending on undergraduate or graduate loans by which point you would just have the remainder of your debt canceled. And then finally, changing repayment options to provide more regular cancellation. Again, on income based repayment plans, instead of having to wait 15 or 20 years, say every year, every two years $2,000 of your debt would be taken off. Meaning as long as you remain in constant repayment, good standing for 12 to 24 months, you are seeing meaningful and immediate relief as opposed to this sort of conceptual relief that doesn't feel like it comes for two decades. So again, a policy menu of options there and look forward to the discussion. Thank you. I'm Wesley and Brent for sharing their research. And my name is Sophie Nguyen. I'm the program associate at the Hague Education Initiative at New America. And before I give my comment remark on their chapters, I would like to share with you guys a findings come from a major project that we do every year at New America, which is varying degrees our annual surveys into higher education. And one of the striking findings of this year's come from the questions when we ask people what they think is the largest sources of consumer debt. There is always that nearly half of Americans think that the largest source of consumer debt is student loan debt. And when we look at it closer by generations, we see that 70% of generation Zs, which is the younger, the generations come after millennials, think that is student loan debt. And 57% of millennials think of it the same way. And as most of you in the room may have already know, the largest of consumer debt is mortgages, which is about $9.6 trillion right now. And student loan debt comes second, but the number is around $1.6 trillion. So the fighting tells us, in the case that the rhetoric that we have been talking about, the student loan crisis actually hasn't really taken root in people's mind when they think about accessing college. And I would say that the crisis is less about borrowing, but it's about repaying student loan. And from the paper that Wesley and Cap wrote, we see that the complexity of the repayment system has indeed contributed to the burden of repaying. And for our borrowers, for our borrowers, we see that black borrowers borrow who didn't complete their degree. And for low, very low income borrowers, they are the ones that experiencing the worst repaying outcome. So when we talk about alleviating, how to alleviate the student loan crisis, we need to think of these group of borrowers first. And that's something that I see both chapter from Wesley and Cap agree on, which is targeting the benefit to black borrowers, to borrowers who didn't complete and to very low income borrowers. And over the past year, we have heard from media that with the coming elections, we have heard a lot of proposals as to how we can solve this problem of the student loan crisis from reforming the repayment system to the variable solutions that Cap mentions that cancel all loans for all students for borrowers. I would say that regardless of the policy solutions, we end up choosing it. The first thing we should consider is that we need to make sure that the policy, the benefit, reach the student who needed the most, the borrowers who needed the most, black borrowers, borrowers with very low balance and very low income borrowers. And last but not least, I would say that we need to make sure those policy solutions are meaningful and have a sustainable outcome. In other words, I would say that a loan forgiveness program would not be as meaningful for borrowers if it doesn't come with a comprehensive and rigorous approach to fix the repayment system and to strengthen the accountability measures. And that's it. Thank you. Hi, I'm Ray Boshara with the St. Louis Fed. I work with Anna and Ray asked me to moderate the session here and you'll hear more from me in just a minute. So I think we're going to go straight to the audience given how much time we have and then I have a few questions ready just in case. All right. Yes, can you please identify yourself? Hi, my name is Betsy Scarey. I am with the National Women's Law Center and I have a question concerning student loans. So I graduated college with six figures of student loan debt. I am jealous of the people who only have $27,000 in student loans, which is very, very sad. So my question is centered on the FAFSA and then you are given a number when you finish the egregious FAFSA education that even completing it is a feat in itself, especially for many students who may not have the resources that I do where I was able to even complete the application. So I'll see a number for expected family contribution. Mine will be nothing and then when I get my student loan award from my institution, it'll say that my aid, it doesn't cover everything I needed to cover. So there's this huge discrepancy, I think, in the amount that students' families can afford to pay and then what these financial institutions are awarding them. So I'm wondering if there's a way for institutions to be held accountable. Is there any policy solution that's in play right now? How can we address this serious problem? Thank you. So I'll just offer there are a number of, I think, solid policies that are out there that really focus on accountability and reforming on the affordability side of college, which is critically important and as we talk about in the chapter, it must be married hand in hand with any real approach to solving the student debt crisis. Solving one without the other is an incomplete approach to this and will have real impacts either for future students or current borrowers. CAP has a plan out that our colleagues on the higher education team at Center for American Progress called Beyond Tuition, which is really focused on tying family income, not just the tuition costs but to the entire cost of what it is to go to college. I can tell you, I too have six figures on student loan. I have scholarships for part of my years plus worked full time and still walked away with that because tuition is only this much of the cost of attending college and so Beyond Tuition and there are a number of other plans out there, some of which have been introduced specifically to address those. Yeah, I'll just add, I mean, I remember that I was a Pell student and I remember exactly that scenario of like EFC was zero, but oh, I have a bill of X. I think, well, one, there's definitely policy solutions that have been proposed Senator Alexander's along been a proponent of simplifying the FAFSA and will bring the paper copy out every single time. He just introduced a bill of standalone last week and right now the House Democrats are considering the College of Fortability Act which includes simplification. I say yes, that's great. It has to, of course, inflation is good but we also have to make sure that formula is right because that formula is what determines the needed aid. I think that has to be married with increased Pell grants, like Pell has not kept up and it has to. I think it should go, it should have a higher maximum, it should also, more people should qualify. And then I think that's of course married with other real affordability efforts at our state public institutions. Sir, can you hold your mic a little closer? Yeah, can you hear me? Okay, and so, thank you for the study, it's important, you know, and I have a sense, but as I listen, I'm just curious and aside from what the institutions do and how much they're charging and, you know, that got to set that aside, when you went through your options, I'm curious about a couple things is so I came out of school when I had debt, all the debt repayment stuff was nothing that the person that is acquiring the debt has to do, you're giving him forgiveness. So I didn't have that option, so I joined the Army and the Army has a debt forgiveness program. So part of the study was if they provide some type of public service, that gives them a little skin in the game to say, you know what, I need to pay that back and so that's an option. The other option was, you know, who pays for the 1.5 trillion? As I listen to the Democratic debates, you know, somebody's going to pay for it, it isn't just going to be wished away. So what, and then what is the thoughtful messaging that says because, you know, people don't want to pay for other people's debt? I mean, that's just selflessness speaking. But there's no real thoughtful messaging to say, if you do this, this is the impact that it has and it creates a much, it's something bigger than yourself and we never get to that narrative. It's always, and so I'm just curious about how to get skin in the game and how do you pay it back. Thank you and thank you for your service as well and maybe pick one of those and address it and follow up after the event and read how much total time do we have left? Just a few more minutes. Okay. Sure, so I'll start with the 1.5 trillion. I think, again, there's a policy menu options. One is the full 1.5 trillion. Others are other plans including forgiving up to a set dollar amount which would have varying actual costs in terms of how much is canceled, excuse me. I'll say, thinking about this in terms of a systemic issue in which we have as a nation systemically failed student loan borrowers, there is a reason why people have so much more debt today than they did 20 or 30 years ago and as we saw in some of the earlier presentations it's because the rise in the cost of college, the drop in the economy and this was essentially a gap that then got filled by student loan. So it's not necessarily, and I would argue it is not in fact an issue of student loan borrowers taking out too much debt, it's an issue of where millennials were faced with very limited options and student loans were the way to advance and achieve this American dream that we had been promised. And then finally I'll say, we pay other people's debts all the time. We bailed out farmers, perhaps rightfully so. We bailed out Detroit, perhaps rightfully so. Not Detroit the city, but Detroit the automakers, excuse me. We pay people's debts, we pay roads for folks that I never get to drive on. When we have one in three millennials with student loan debt and we see the home ownership rates at the rate that we do for our generation when we see the lack of retirement savings that we do for our generation, this is about our overall nation's economy. We are 38% on one of the sides of the working population right now. This isn't just about me, it's about us. And I think the more that we can talk about how this is about us, the better off we'll be. I'll just say, on the public service thing, we actually have a program, public service loan forgiveness. It has been awful in the implementation. It was an overly complex program that Congress wrote. The department didn't do a great job. Service, everyone's to blame here. We could fix that and do that. And then I'll just say briefly, I think, while I'm not supportive of massive debt forgiveness, I think the logic, though, is that we invest in the Pell Grant because we believe that people should have access to a higher education because when we know what it does for a person, their livelihood, their healthier, they live longer, they're just happier, they contribute to the economy. I think, so, again, not for broad forgiveness, but I think an investment higher education is worth it because we should believe in that access for that public good, and I think it also pays off. There's an economic ripple effect, and I have a whole report about that, about how that ripples to the economy. Okay, thank you. I'm getting the signal from Reid, so please hold your question. Maybe we'll be able to get to it in the policy discussion. If I can make just a very brief observation. I really appreciated Sophie's question about equity. If you're gonna do student loan forgiveness, but I was intrigued with the differences on your two lists. So in your four problem areas, there was three areas of overlap between your lists, but you had for-profit colleges on your list, whereas you had people with dependents on yours, and I'm wondering, I'd just love to see a reconciliation of those two lists as we think about equity for any kind of student loan forgiveness program, because I think it's a critical question. We, at Generation Progress, we spend a tremendous amount of time working on four-profit colleges, and there's tons of overlap in terms of the borrowers who go to a four-profit college and some of the other demographic areas. Right, I mean, they're in that group, right. And students with dependents, they account for 24% of students, so they're in everything. I just think it's the right question, because the concern I have is that it will result in just more wealth accumulation for families who could probably afford to pay the loans off anyway. So I really appreciate that important point. Let's thank our panel here for their great work. Thank you.