By Eliza Haverstock | NerdWallet
As the Nov. 5 election looms, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump offer starkly different visions for student loan policy at a time when the topic is top of mind for voters.
More than one in five student loan borrowers (22%) say that student loan forgiveness is one of the most important issues when choosing a presidential candidate, according to a recent NerdWallet survey conducted online by The Harris Poll. Both parties are thinking about the issue: 43% of Democrats and 30% of Republicans say student loan repayment will impact their vote, per the recent 2024 EdAssist by Bright Horizons Education Index.
The official Democratic and Republican platforms, along with past statements, actions and related policy documents, indicate how each candidate may approach student loans if elected to the White House.
Harris and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, would likely continue to champion the student loan efforts started under President Biden, who has erased $168.5 billion in student loan debt for 4.76 million borrowers while in office. His administration did so largely by improving existing student loan forgiveness programs.
If Trump and his vice president pick, Ohio senator JD Vance, win the White House, borrowers can expect a reigning in of relief and forgiveness programs.
“On the Trump side, this is someone who, as president, consistently proposed big cuts to all federal education funding, but especially to programs that would help students and student loan borrowers,” says Michelle Dimino, director of education at the center-left think tank Third Way. “On the Harris side, we have a history of supporting increases for Federal Student Aid and consumer protections for borrowers.”
(Neither campaign responded to multiple NerdWallet requests to comment on their student loan positions.)
Project 2025, a 900-page playbook for the next Republican president overseen by the conservative Heritage Foundation, also offers clues about what a Trump presidency could mean for student loan borrowers, even though Trump’s campaign has tried to distance itself from the document.
“It’s still very much put forward as a Republican Party conservative viewpoint on education, and so I think it includes a lot of policy proposals that there would be a lot of lobbying to get a potential Trump administration to implement,” says Katharine Meyer, a fellow in the Governance Studies program for the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings, a nonpartisan think tank.
From repayment plans and loan forgiveness to affordable degrees and community college, here’s where Harris and Trump stand on issues impacting student loan borrowers.
Broad student loan forgiveness
Biden’s “plan B” for broad student loan forgiveness is currently facing legal blowback from Republican-led states. It could be months before borrowers have a decision, and the outcome is largely dependent on the courts, independent of November’s election results.
However, an incoming presidential administration still has power to sway the effort in their desired direction and to drive the appeals process, Dimino says.
“I think certainly a Harris administration would be working to continue to defend that effort for as long as they can, continuing the appeals process and being as aggressive as they can be to safeguard that,” she says.
Trump would most likely not support the forgiveness plan, echoing the Republican party’s opposition to student loan forgiveness. Republican-led states filed lawsuits that took down Biden’s original student loan forgiveness plan of up to $20,000 per borrower in 2023, along with lawsuits currently circling the SAVE repayment plan and Biden’s forgiveness “plan B.”
“In the past, [Trump] has been supportive of student loan cancellation. It was in his campaign eight years ago, which was really inconsistent with the Republican Party’s platform at that time,” says Beth Akers, senior fellow focused on the economics of higher education at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank. “Things have changed a lot since then, and I would anticipate that a Trump presidency would not be pushing on continuing to use any existing authorities to cancel student debt, instead maybe a reining in of the programs, working potentially with lawmakers on Capitol Hill to create some of the reforms that conservatives now think are necessary in order to get the student loan program back into a functional state.”
SAVE and other income-driven repayment plans
Like Biden’s forgiveness plan B, the SAVE repayment plan faces lawsuits, with its future largely dependent on the courts. However, if elected, Harris would likely vigorously defend the plan in court, Dimino says.
Meanwhile, Trump is likely to support the dissolution of SAVE. “Certainly in a Trump administration, there would be every effort to enact regulations striking down SAVE, even if it were ruled constitutionally appropriate,” Meyer says. “This sort of regulatory whiplash happens with every presidential transition in nearly every area of policy where the parties disagree.”
Instead of SAVE and other existing income-driven repayment (IDR) plans, Project 2025 calls for a single IDR option that would generally increase monthly payments for borrowers relative to SAVE and other current options. It would also aim to remove the loan forgiveness option; under current IDR plans, borrowers can get forgiveness after 20 or 25 years of payments.
“While income-driven repayment (IDR) of student loans is a superior approach relative to fixed payment plans, the number of IDR plans has proliferated beyond reason,” the document says. “And recent IDR plans are so generous that they require no or only token repayment from many students.”
A family of four that earns $50,000 a year would have a $0 monthly payment under SAVE. But under the Project 2025 IDR plan, that family’s payment would be about $156 per month, Meyer says.
Public Service Loan Forgiveness
Teachers, doctors, firefighters, police officers, military members, government employees and and other nonprofit workers benefit from the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, which erases your remaining federal student debt after 10 years of public service and 120 monthly student loan payments.
“Under the Biden-Harris administration, we’ve seen some of the biggest Public Service Loan Forgiveness loan discharges ever. They’ve tried to make the process easier. They streamlined the application, making it easier to recertify with your employers, so taking down some of those administrative barriers to accessing PSLF relief,” Dimino says.
In June, the Education Department also began an effort to expand PSLF eligibility to early childhood educators who don’t necessarily work for nonprofits. Under a Harris presidency, borrowers can expect the government to continue prioritizing PSLF access, Dimino says.
As president and on the campaign trail, Trump has called for restricting loan forgiveness overall and making PSLF harder to access, Dimino says. “It makes a less certain future for folks who have been working toward forgiveness,” she adds. At one point in 2019, the Education Department rejected 99% of PSLF applications, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office.
Project 2025 goes even further, calling for the program first introduced by Republican President George W. Bush in 2007 to shutter: “The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which prioritizes government and public sector work over private sector employment, should be terminated.”
Community college, trade school and free tuition
There’s bi-partisan support for alternatives to the four-year college degree, but the parties have different approaches.
“Both Democrats and Republicans are having to return to this idea that college should deliver something to students,” Akers says. “It used to be, ‘college is just this golden ticket, it’ll take me somewhere magical, and that’s good enough.’ But now I think Americans are like, ‘wait a minute, what’s the ROI on this investment? What am I getting, and what’s the opportunity?’”
The Harris campaign platform pledges to “make trade school and community college free for every American” and says it’s working to subsidize tuition at Minority Serving Institutions (such as Historically Black Colleges and Universities) for students whose families earn less than $125,000 per year. Harris’s vice president pick, Governor Walz, signed a bill into law in 2023 that made Minnesota public higher education free for families in the state earning less than $80,000 per year.
The Trump platform says it “will support the creation of additional, drastically more affordable alternatives to a traditional four-year College degree.” That could mean investing in trade schools, vocational programs, community colleges and other career pathways, Akers says.
Borrower defense to repayment
When she was California’s attorney general a decade ago, Harris prosecuted Corinthian Colleges, alleging that the for-profit institution intentionally misled students about job placement rates. In 2022, the Education Department approved $5.8 billion in student loan discharges for more than half a million former Corinthian students, under the borrower defense to repayment program.
As president, Harris would likely continue supporting borrower defense, Akers says. The program began in 1995 to protect borrowers who are defrauded or misled by their colleges.
Trump’s record indicates that he may be opposed to strengthening borrower defense. For example, in 2020, then-President Trump vetoed a bipartisan resolution that would have overturned a 2019 borrower defense rule that made it tougher for students who say they were defrauded by colleges to get federal student loan discharge.
Project 2025 calls for Congress to end the Education Department’s broad ability to forgive loans through the borrower defense program. Instead, the Department should only be allowed to discharge loans in limited, case-by-case situations where “convincing evidence exists to demonstrate that an educational institution engaged in fraud toward a borrower in connection with his or her enrollment in the institution and the student’s educational program or activity at the institution.”
Pell Grants
The federal Pell Grant program, which gives undergraduates from low-income backgrounds up to $7,395 per year to help pay for college, has been around since the 1970s. Biden increased the maximum Pell award by $900 during his term — the largest expansion in over a decade.
In her platform, Harris emphasizes Biden’s Pell record and promises to expand the program further: “For young people just heading to college now, we’ve already secured the largest increase in Pell Grants in a decade, and we’ll further expand these grants to 7 million more students, and double the maximum award by 2029.”
Though Trump is unlikely to strike down the Pell, further increases to the maximum award are less certain if he wins the White House. “I don’t think [Trump] is against Pell, but he has proposed cuts to it as president in the past,” says Dimino. “I think we would expect that the Pell Grant will be in greater jeopardy under [that] administration than under a Harris administration,”
Project 2025 supports maintaining Pell grants in their current “voucher-like” form.
Congressional elections matter, too
While the presidential election is extremely consequential, the upcoming congressional elections will also impact future student loan policies.
The U.S. Congress (composed of the Senate and the House) must align with the president to push legislation forward, though some policy work can be done without formal legislation, Akers explains. The president can veto bills passed by Congress, while Congress can refuse to pass bills that the president might support.
“A lot of what ultimately gets done will rely on the makeup of Congress and what the majorities look like in Congress for that president, along with the pending court cases,” says Dimino.
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Eliza Haverstock writes for NerdWallet. Email: [email protected]. Twitter: @elizahaverstock.
The article Harris v. Trump on Student Loans: Where the Candidates Stand originally appeared on NerdWallet.
