KALAMAZOO, Mich. — The United States Supreme Court struck down a plan Friday that would have wiped away or reduced student loans for millions of Americans.
READ MORE: Supreme Court strikes down President Biden’s plan to forgive student loans
FOX 17 talked with a current student and a professor to learn about how this is impacting our community members in West Michigan.
“It was a hard decision for me to even want to go back…and get my master’s degree just because of how expensive it really, truly is,” Taylor Teravest, an Indiana Wesleyan University graduate student, said.
Teravest told FOX 17 Friday that she couldn’t believe the Supreme Court’s decision.
She says she did not qualify for assistance from the Kalamazoo Promise because she has already stacked up loans from getting her bachelor’s degree.
“School is really expensive,” Teravest added. “I want to better myself and I want to get educated, but I respect all those people that don’t want to go back to school because it’s so expensive, and we’re not getting that assistance that we could be getting.”
Although discouraging to many, this SCOTUS decision wasn’t unexpected.
“They did wait until the last day of the term and to issue the last day that they released decisions to put this at the end, so they did know it was controversial and obviously has a large policy impact,” Matt Grossmann, an American politics and public policy professor at Michigan State University, said.
Grossmann says young people are the ones who will be impacted the most.
“In reality, it was mostly just a benefit for people at the beginning of their careers, and so that was the main factions,” he said. “We’re talking about a lot of young people who will now owe a lot more debt.”
However, he explained that just because the Supreme Court struck down debt forgiveness Friday, doesn’t mean it can’t happen in the future.
“The Supreme Court just said that the Biden administration could not do this on their own. Everyone agreed that if Congress were to pass a new law forgiving debt, then it could go into effect,” Grossmann added.
