Welcome to the Waves Slates podcast about gender, feminism, and student loan forgiveness.

Every episode, you get a new pair of women to talk about the thing we can't get off

our minds.

And today, you've got me, Lizzie O'Leary, host of What Next TVD.

And me, Emily Peck, co-host of Slate Money.

Hello.

Hello, Lizzie.

It's nice to see you.

Yeah.

We are going to dig into Biden's loan forgiveness plan.

But I just want to drop my background, which is I have been really interested in student

debt and debt relief since I started covering it, which was about 2013 or so.

And that reporting really upended a lot of, I think, my assumptions about debt, who has

it, what it looks like, how much there is.

And by that point, I had paid off my grad school loans.

I did not have undergrad loans, thanks to my parents and my grandfather.

And when I started doing, like, the in-depth reporting, I did a big series and I thought

that I would be hearing the, like, I have $200,000 in loans, horror stories.

And instead, you know, the things that were really trapping people were balances of $8,000,

$12,000, $22,000, they were especially hurting women the most, especially hurting women

of color.

And often they were, like, degrees that weren't seen as having a high earnings premium in

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