Bay Area students react to Supreme Court rejecting Biden's student debt forgiveness plan

The Supreme Court rejected President Joe Biden’s plan to wipe away $400 billion in student debt, and while the president is pledging to take another route to fulfill his campaign promise, Friday’s hearing leaves millions of current and former students in limbo.

“Now I have to plan ahead again, now I have to plan what I have to do this year in order to pay off some of this debt,” said Malik Lewis of San Jose State University. 

The proposal would have allowed an estimated 43 million Americans to cancel up to $20,000 in student loan debt.

Lewis said he and his brother, who’s almost done with college, were among them.

“We all attend college to gain the experience and to figure out who we are as people, and throwing in the money [aspect] kind of puts a barrier on the things we can explore,” he said.

The director of financial aid at Cal State East Bay said the average student taking loans there leave about $21,000 to pay off -- the Biden plan would have forgiven most of it.

“A lot of students have been betting on this, have been deciding to come back to school because of this hope that they had in having their loans forgiven,” said Sonia Jethani. “Now we have another barrier at our financial aid office to have to go through in order to make sure that these students succeed.”

Conservatives cheered the ruling, saying it would’ve been unfair for many hardworking taxpayers who already paid their loans off, or didn’t go to college.

Some still paying off their loans 20 years later agreed with the sentiment.

“I’m definitely more on the side of we just need to keep paying our loans, we know what we got ourselves into,” said Kim Novoa-Villicana of Fairfield. 

Separately, the student loan repayment process will start back up in the fall after it was paused during the pandemic.

President Biden said he’s working on a new path, including an option to protect borrowers from defaulting on their loans for one year.