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Welcome to the Waves, Slate's 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 TBD?

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

Hello.

Hello, Lizzie. It's nicehost 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 the workplace or or people who went to school and had debt but no

degree. They didn't finish, which is the worst of all worlds. This is a topic for me I can't

stop thinking about because, well, for a while, I didn't think about it at all.

I paid off my student loans back in 2015 and more recently watched the debate over loan forgiveness with kind of bemused indifference.

I guess if I'm being honest, I mean, people have very strong opinions about the

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