Deserving Debtors? Determinants of Attitudes towards Student Debt Relief

• In Event: Public Opinion: Market Conditioning, Opportunity, and Redistributive Policies

Abstract

President Biden’s recent effort to cancel some amount of federal student loan debt (at time of writing still proceeding through the courts) further heightened the political salience of student loan debt as an issue, following several proposals for debt cancelation that took place during the last presidential election cycle. However, despite this recent heightened salience and the clear political relevance of the issue, there is relatively little scholarly work on the political implications of both personal debt such as student loan debt as a phenomenon generally, and the nature of support or opposition to policies that benefit debtors among the electorate specifically. It is this gap in the scholarly literature that this project aims to fill, with implications for not just our understanding of what impacts attitudes surrounding student debt relief specifically, but also redistributive policies more broadly.

The literature on attitudes towards redistributive policies, and willingness to support them, has mainly focused on groups that are by most objective measures relatively severe material deprivation, such as those in poverty who receive some form of welfare benefits. However, groups in such dire straits are not the only possible beneficiaries of redistributive policies. The recent efforts to cancel federal student loan debt illustrate this. Student loan debtors are a group that occupies a space in society where they can plausibly be considered both privileged (due to their education), and marginalized (due to their debt). This represents an opportunity to expand our understanding of the factors that influence notions of deservingness and how they impact willingness to support redistributive policies.

Do the same factors that have an impact on willingness to support policies such as welfare benefits or cash transfers apply when the group that is in a position to benefit from the policy in question is more “white-collar”? Or does the dynamic differ when it comes to groups whose relative position in society is more ambiguous than those living on the poverty line? How well does our knowledge of what determines whether a group is thought of as “deserving” translate to contexts outside of immediate poverty?

I test several theoretical explanations, from the broader literature on political attitudes regarding deservingness and determinants of support for redistributive policy, for why non-debtors would support or oppose giving student debtors some form of relief from their debt, through means of an online conjoint survey experiment. The demographic characteristics that respondents are primed to associate with student debtors as a group are randomly manipulated prior to taking measures of support or opposition to some form of student debt relief, as well as measures of blame attribution. Through this method, several different possible theoretical explanations for the determinants of attitudes towards the determinants of attitudes towards debtors specifically, and the perceived beneficiaries of redistributive policies generally, can be tested.

These theoretical explanations include group attitudes, such as prejudice or affinity for racial in-groups or out groups. By varying whether respondents are primed to perceive student debtors as a group as being disproportionately composed of one racial or ethnic group or another, we can see whether findings from the broader deservingness and redistributive policies literature (such as in some cases lower support for policies such as welfare benefits being associated among whites with perceptions that beneficiaries were disproportionately non-white) travel to student debtors as a group. The gender that respondents are primed to associate with debtors as a group also varies.

Perhaps more interestingly for advancing the literature on notions of deservingness and attitudes towards policy, this set-up also allows for the manipulation of several characteristics that that have substantiative theoretical implications. Do factors that may in a different context may communicate higher or lower levels of deservingness and responsibility apply to student debtors and their more ambiguous societal place they occupy? For example, by randomly manipulating whether respondents are primed to associate debtors with either successful degree completion (college graduates) or withdrawing before completion (college dropouts), whether or not these characteristics are associated with higher or lower willingness to forgive student debt can be examined. Does framing debtors as being college graduates, rather than dropouts, lead to them being perceived as more deserving and worthy of support (through mechanisms such as signaling higher responsibility and worth ethic), or less deserving and worthy of support (through mechanisms such as signaling higher levels of privilege)? The level of degree obtained (graduate degrees vs. bachelor’s) is also manipulated for the same reason.

Author

• Alex Ross, Université Laval