With millions of people set to see $10,000 or more of their student loans deleted, The Day asked its readers what they thought of President Joe Biden’s new policy.

Under a program announced last week, people with federally owned student loans who are not high-income borrowers qualify. People must make less than $125,000 yearly, or $250,000 per household, to qualify for loan forgiveness. Most people will have $10,000 in debt wiped away, although certain borrowers could have up to $20,000. It has been called a sweeping move by some — it provides relief to around 43 million Americans and rids debt entirely for about 20 million people. But millions are still left in significant debt; the cumulative federal student loan debt is at $1.6 trillion.

The Day asked its readers whether they would get a break on their student loans under the program, and whether they recently finished paying off their student loans. The answers varied by experiences with loans and from across the political spectrum, and showed student loan debt forgiveness to be mostly a partisan issue, with Republicans opposed and Democrats in favor.

Owen Hughes of Stonington said he is more than 70 years old and did not claim a political party. He acknowledged that the student loan debt issue is complicated. He brought up what several other respondents did, the timing of Biden’s decree in the midst of election season — “If one is being charitable, one will assume it isn’t just another vote-buying scheme, it’s a long-felt need to address a very large problem,” Hughes said.

“The moment you say, ‘No, not a penny,’ you’re confronted with the fact that there are a lot of people out there carrying a lot of debt,” Hughes said. “But if you suddenly say, ‘Oh, we’re going to have a debt jubilee and everything goes to zero, what about all the other obligations? My car loan? My mortgage? What morally distinguishes that?”

Hughes acknowledged the ballooning price of college tuition, which costs significantly more than the $4,000 a year he took out in loans decades ago and repaid in full. He suggested looking at the cost of college tuition rather than simply wiping away debt.

According to the National Center for Education, the average price for a college education has jumped 169% between 1980 and 2021, from slightly more than $10,000 annually to almost $29,000 annually. As for elite schools, which regularly cost $70,000 a year, some respondents said that if you know you can’t afford it or that you won’t be able to pay back the loan, you shouldn’t have taken it out in the first place.

Karan Conover, an East Haddam Democrat who grew up in Groton, was one of the few respondents who wholeheartedly supported Biden’s decision on student loan debt. She said her son is benefiting, though her daughter, who has already paid off her student loans, is not.

Conover called out the double standard of people in her generation who say they were able to pay off their loans.

“I’m in my 60s. I had loans I took out for UConn. In those days I could walk into a bank and get my student loan without even cosigning for it,” she said. “I had a part-time job and could pay them off. They weren’t expensive. Nowadays, that is not the case.”

She spoke to the difficult position young Americans are placed in when they get out of college, with low-paying jobs and an unaffordable housing market facing them as they try and pay down debt.

“You’re told you have to have a degree for everything now. So you invest all this money in your education, but no employer is paying enough for you to pay off the thing,” Conover said, referring to student loan debt. “Then you get loans where you end up paying more than what you actually paid because of interest, and nobody can get out of the hole. You can’t buy a house because you can’t afford it — all of that is a hit on the economy.”

Conover took exception to a prevailing attitude of “just because I didn’t get the break means you shouldn’t get it.”

“I feel like Republicans don’t want anyone to benefit. They think everything’s an entitlement,” Conover said.

James Bush, an unaffiliated voter from Waterford who leans Libertarian, said he and his wife paid off their student loans last year after paying them down for a decade.

Bush said he is not bitter that he so recently finished paying down his student loans. But he doesn’t think the loan cancellation is the best way to go about correcting the issue of overpriced education.

“I don’t think going up and wiping the slate away is going to effectively solve the problem. I do think there’s a problem with the cost of college for people,” Bush said. “We’ve got the midterms coming up. It just feels like this was a little ploy to buy some votes without addressing the real problem.”

Bush said that the problem and solution lies with institutions of higher education and their year-over-year tuition increases.

“If you’re a college and you’re taking state and federal dollars, you should have some responsibility to make sure you’re providing an affordable education,” Bush said. “The price of college has been rising way faster than the pace of inflation for like three decades. Where’s the accountability of going to these universities and saying, ‘Hey guys, 10, 11, 12 percent increases every year, we’re not going to let our dollars go toward that.”

Mary Lynch-Keppel, a Republican and long-time Groton resident who now lives in Pennsylvania, said she felt the Biden decision “was a bunch of crap.”

“I was raised in a time where if you took out a loan you paid for it, period, whether you could do it or not. If you couldn’t pay the loan back, you couldn’t take out the loan. Nothing was handed to me, I had to earn everything I have, and if I couldn’t afford it, I didn’t buy it,” Lynch-Keppel said.

She feels the same about other bailout programs that forgave loans such as the Payment Protection Program, in which $800 billion was issued by the federal government to help businesses during the pandemic as she doesn’t agree with bailouts in any form.

“It’s not up to me when I pay taxes to pay off somebody else’s debt,” Lynch-Keppel said. “I don’t believe in handouts unless they’re really needed. You do it, you figure it out yourself. If there’s no other recourse, if you have exhausted every other availability, then yes, I will help you.”

Bill Carpiniello, a Lyme Republican who said he was born in 1932, said he and his wife were able to save money to put their kids through school. He worried that canceling loan debt would send the wrong message to young people.

“Once you make a loan, you have a very strong commitment to returning that money,” Carpiniello said. “When you get a program like this, you know it’s going to be abused in some way. I sound harsh, I’m not a harsh man. I just think that, by-gum, you borrow money — and there are extreme cases of course, illness, children coming from homes of poverty, I can understand that. But there are an awful lot of people going to school where you pay $50,000 a year who are paying huge loans. Then select a school that doesn’t cost that much!”

Other respondents who answered The Day via email or Facebook message but could not be reached by phone had a variety of views on student loan debt, including answers asking that everyone with outstanding loans in any form receive at least $10,000 worth of forgiveness.

Other respondents said they felt Biden’s decision could create purchasing/saving/investing power for a segment of the population who in the past haven’t had this financial power, and it could help the economy for decades in the future.

Others were squarely in the Lynch-Keppel and Carpiniello camp, calling student loan debt cancellation a handout and a straightforward violation of a contract. People argued that they saved money for many years, even skipping vacations, to pay off their loans or their children’s loans — why should this new generation of students be spared? Still others, who weren’t even Biden supporters, talked about how much student loan debt cancellation would immediately help them and their families.

s.spinella@theday.com