Does Perspective Taking Increase Support for Student Loan Forgiveness?

• In Event: Local Context, Personal Experience, and Redistributive Preferences

Abstract

It is estimated that the US student loan debt balance now exceeds $1.77 trillion. Nonetheless, the burdens of student loan debt are not evenly distributed among Americans. Rather, there persists a race gap, a generational gap, and a socioeconomic class gap between those Americans who needed student loans in order to afford the cost of higher education. The Covid-19 pandemic saw the pausing of student loan repayments from March 2020 through September 2023. The Biden administration arguably capitalized on this issue by promising young voters student debt relief in exchange for their support in the 2020 presidential election. Nonetheless, despite over three years of pauses on student loan repayments, Americans with student loans saw the potential forgiveness of some of their debt become one of the most politicized issues in American politics and all of it come to a halt with the Supreme Court’s eventual ruling in June 2023, with Americans of all races, partisan affiliations, and socioeconomic backgrounds taking staunch positions on the proposed policy.

In this study, we ask: what are the factors that shape support for student loan forgiveness? In what ways can Americans be persuaded to support policies aimed at reducing financial burdens created by student loans, many of which are predatory in nature. To answer these questions we turn to three survey experiments fielded on the 2022 and 2023 Cooperative Election Study (CES) surveys. We employ multiple perspective taking experiments to examine whether perspective taking can shape student loan forgiveness support, and to tease out possible mechanisms. We find that one’s personal experience with student loans is among the most important factors in shaping support for student loan forgiveness, but that perspective taking is very influential in improving support for loan forgiveness among those without any student debt experience. Additional analyses also reveal that, despite the politicization of this policy, perspective taking significantly improves support for such a policy among Republicans and Democrats, indicating that partisans of all stripes can perhaps come to more similar policy stances on this issue.

Authors

• John Seungmin Kuk, Michigan State University

• Nazita Lajevardi, Michigan State University

• Kelsey E Osborne-Garth, Michigan State University