The Education Jubilee

The problem

Americans owe the federal government $1.67 trillion in student loans, spread across 42.3 million borrowers. The argument about what to do with that number has been running for a decade and has settled into a shape that satisfies nobody. One side proposes cancelling some of it. The other side points out, correctly, that cancellation pays a specific minority of adults for a specific decision and bills everyone else. In 2022 the executive branch tried the first approach at a scale the Congressional Budget Office priced at about $400 billion; in June 2023 the Supreme Court struck it down, 6 to 3, in Biden v. Nebraska, on the ground that Congress had never authorised it.

Set the legal question aside. The fairness objection to forgiveness is not a talking point; it is the whole problem.

Forgiveness sends a cheque to the person who borrowed and none to the person who worked two jobs to avoid borrowing. None to the nurse who finished paying last year. None to the six in ten adult Americans without a bachelor's degree, many of whom were told at seventeen that college was the only respectable door and then priced out of it. None to the parent trying to save for a child. It treats the borrowers as the injured party, when the injury was done to everyone by the same thing: a price.

The price is the actual story. Published tuition and fees at a public four-year university now average $11,950 a year for an in-state student, and have more than doubled in real terms since the early 1990s. The federal government helped. A Federal Reserve Bank of New York study found that when the government raised the caps on subsidised student loans, colleges captured roughly 60 cents of every extra dollar as higher tuition. The subsidy became the price. Forgiving the loans that resulted, without touching the price, sets up the next round.

The Old Testament jubilee, every fiftieth year, was not a bailout for the indebted. It was a reset for the whole society at once, after which the rules changed. That is the right model.

The proposal

One Education Cheque of $10,000 to every adult American citizen, spendable on education only, anyone's education, one time. It pays down any education loan, funds any accredited course or registered apprenticeship for the holder or a family member, or can be given outright to any student at an American institution, citizen or not. Each later cohort's cheque shrinks as tuition falls, and the program sunsets on a fixed date.

How it would work

1. Who gets it. Every citizen aged 18 or over on the day of enactment, and every citizen on their 18th birthday during the program's life. Citizens only, without exception, the same line № 004 draws for CitizenCare. It arrives on the same registry as the Dividend share of № 001; no application, no income test, no form.

1. What it can buy. Four uses, and only these:

- repayment of any education loan, federal or private, in the holder's name or a family member's; - tuition, fees, or exam costs at any accredited institution or registered apprenticeship (№ 028), for the holder or a family member; - a gift of any part of the balance to any other person's cheque or tuition account, provided the recipient is enrolled at an American institution. A citizen may pay for a niece, a neighbour's child, an orphan in the foster system, or a foreign student at the state university. The cheque is the citizen's; the choice is the citizen's; - a rollover into a child's Baby Share (№ 008), where it is locked until 18.

It is never cash. Unused balances expire at the sunset.

1. The price condition. An institution may accept cheques only if it agrees to hold published tuition growth at or below inflation for the life of the program and to carry a share of the losses on its own graduates' defaulted loans. A college that refuses is free to, and its students are free to spend their cheques on their loans instead of on it. This is the lever that makes the money follow the student rather than the sticker.

1. The taper. The first cohort's cheque is $10,000. Each year, the cheque for that year's new 18-year-olds is scaled by a public Tuition Index: average net tuition at public four-year institutions against its level in 1995, in real dollars. If tuition falls back to 1995 levels, the cheque for new cohorts falls to zero. The country pays a large sum once to break a price, and pays less every year the price actually breaks.

1. The sunset. Fifteen years from enactment, whatever the index says. A jubilee that recurs is not a jubilee; it is an entitlement, and the point of this one is to make itself unnecessary.

1. What it replaces. Nothing that is already promised. Pell remains for the students who need more than $10,000. Income-driven repayment remains for those who need more time. What ends is the executive-branch practice of cancelling debt by memo for one group, without a vote, and without a plan for the price.

The numbers

Headline exposure. Roughly 245 million adult citizens at $10,000 each is a ceiling of about $2.45 trillion. Not all of it will be drawn, because it is not cash, but transferability means most of it will be, so assume 80 percent: about $2 trillion over ten years, or on the order of $200 billion a year. Say that number out loud. It is five times the cost of the cancelled 2022 plan, and it reaches nearly six times as many people.

Year one. The 42.3 million existing borrowers will use theirs immediately, against a $1.67 trillion portfolio. Ten thousand dollars retires the entire balance for roughly a third of them, whose loans are under $10,000, and it is money the Treasury is largely owed by itself: a federal loan repaid with a federal cheque is a transfer from one government account to another, with a real borrower released in the middle.

What forgiveness would have bought instead. $400 billion, 43 million people, no change to the price, and no cheque for the other 200 million adults.

What the taper is worth. If the price condition and the index do their job and net public tuition falls by a third over the program's life, the cheque for later cohorts falls with it. The last cohorts cost a fraction of the first, and the final cost could land well under the $2 trillion estimate. If the price does not fall, the sunset caps the bill anyway, and the country will know, in public and by name, which institutions kept the money and raised the price.

The honest objections

"Hand colleges $2 trillion and they will raise tuition by $2 trillion. You just cited the study that proves it." This is the objection that could sink the proposal, and it deserves the most careful answer rather than the most confident one. The New York Fed's 60-cent finding applied to money that could only be spent at a college. The cheque can also be spent on a loan, or handed to someone else, or rolled into a locked account, which means an institution that raises its price is competing against a student's other options for the same dollars. Add the price condition in item 3, and the honest expectation is that some capture will still happen, particularly at institutions that decline the condition and rely on prestige. That residual capture is a real cost of the design and it is the reason the program is one-time and tapering rather than permanent.

"It is five times more expensive than forgiveness." Yes. That is the price of not deciding that 43 million people are more deserving than 200 million. This catalog said the word "trillion" out loud for CitizenCare and it says it here. Universality is not an extravagance added to the design; it is the only version of the design that is fair, and it is the version that can pass, because the plumber's household is inside it.

"A surgeon earning $400,000 gets the same cheque as a dishwasher." She does, and she also paid for it, which is the arrangement Alaska has run for four decades without incident. Means-testing would save perhaps a tenth of the cost and would reintroduce the application, the phase-out cliff, and the office that the people who most need this will never visit. The surgeon will most likely give hers away, which the design allows on purpose.

"You are letting Americans pay tuition for foreigners." Only by a citizen's free choice, with the citizen's own cheque. A country that wants to be followed rather than merely accommodated should want the world to see an American family fund a Ghanaian engineering student at Iowa State because they chose to. It costs the Treasury nothing it was not already paying, and it is the cheapest form of the leadership № 006 argues for.

"Why not just fund public universities directly and make them free?" Because that pays for one door and this pays for any door. Free public tuition does nothing for the 60 percent of adults who are past the age for it, nothing for the apprentice, and nothing for the borrower. A cheque follows the person. Direct funding follows the institution, and institutions are the party whose prices this proposal is trying to break.

"$200 billion a year into the economy is inflationary." Some of it will be, and the honest reply is that the largest single use in year one, repaying federal loans, is a book entry rather than new spending, and the remainder is spread over a decade by the mechanics of tuition schedules. The macroeconomic effect is real and smaller than the headline, and it is disclosed here rather than discovered later.

Sources

• Federal Student Aid, Federal Student Loan Portfolio, outstanding balance and recipient counts as of June 2025, studentaid.gov
• Congressional Budget Office, cost estimate of the 2022 student debt cancellation plan, September 2022, cbo.gov
• Biden v. Nebraska, 600 U.S. 477 (2023), supremecourt.gov
• College Board, Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid 2025, average published tuition and fees, public four-year in-state, research.collegeboard.org
• Lucca, Nadauld and Shen, Credit Supply and the Rise in College Tuition: Evidence from the Expansion in Federal Student Aid Programs, Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Report 733; Review of Financial Studies 32:2 (2019)
• U.S. Census Bureau, educational attainment of the adult population, census.gov
• Leviticus 25, on the year of jubilee, for the model and the name
• Proposals № 001 (The American Dividend); № 004 (CitizenCare); № 006 (The Marshall Compact); № 008 (Baby Shares); № 028 (The Apprentice Republic)