From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Ketroweth. This is The Daily.

This week, President Biden announced a plan to cancel significant amounts of student loan debt

for tens of millions of Americans.

Today, my colleague Stacey Cowley, on what exactly the plan does, the intense debate it has

generated and how it could transform the way Americans pay for higher education.

It's Friday, August 26th.

Stacey, welcome back.

Hi, Natalie. Great to be here.

So, this is a real full circle kind of moment because the last time you were on the show

in April, you described President Biden's dilemma when it came to student loans.

Biden, like Trump before him, allowed tens of millions of borrowers to stop making payments

on their student loans in this policy that began during the pandemic.

And you told us that there were some big questions that raised.

Like, would he just keep pausing those repayments indefinitely?

Would he take some more dramatic action like canceling student debt altogether?

And now we have our answers.

Yeah, this is a completely enormous change to the system.

So we have around 45 million people in this country with student loan debt, totaling

$1.6 trillion.

That's more money than people owe on their auto loans, on their credit cards, on any

other kind of consumer debt outside of mortgage.

Right.

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