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Flight experience and licensing is mandatory for incoming pilots, and a labor shortage has created a significant need to increase the numbers in the pipeline.
A five-year reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration has become the unlikely stage for another round of sparring on the thorny issue of student debt relief, with Congress retreating to the familiar territory of enabling more debt rather than investing in education.
A provision tucked into the 1,072-page bill would increase current federal student loan limits for flight education and training. Flight experience and licensing is mandatory for incoming pilots, and a labor shortage has created a significant need to increase the numbers in the pipeline, with some airlines canceling flights over the past several years due to sheer lack of manpower. Flight training alone can cost as much as $80,000 for a four-year degree, not including tuition.
The increase in loan limits, which will allow up to $107,500 in borrowing toward a degree for qualified programs, may enable more students to afford flight education. It’s taken from a bipartisan bill introduced by Sens. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Dan Sullivan (R-AK) last year, though the increases are smaller than what that bill envisioned.
But in exchange, the current FAA bill includes a provision that says that, regarding flight education and training loans, the government “may not take any action to cancel or forgive the outstanding balances, or portion of balances, on any Federal Direct Unsubsidized Stafford Loan, or otherwise modify the terms or conditions of a Federal Direct Unsubsidized Stafford Loan, made to an eligible student, except as authorized by an Act of Congress.”
This would create a carve-out for flight education from any mass cancellation program, such as the one the Education Department is negotiating right now in a rulemaking process. The prohibition on debt cancellation was not in the original Baldwin-Sullivan bill.
Since the prohibition wasn’t in the original bill, it certainly feels like it was inserted due to a Republican demand during negotiations, amid their high-profile fight to bar mass student debt relief. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), ranking Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee, was one of the key negotiators of the FAA reauthorization.
Republican attorneys general appealed to the Supreme Court to strike down Biden’s first debt relief plan, and have recently mounted a second lawsuit about the administration’s version of income-driven repayment, which has been in place in one form or another for over three decades.
The provision talks specifically of “mass cancellation,” so presumably income-driven repayment programs would be unaffected. But a final adjudication of that would be up to the courts, and it could mean that flight education debtors might not even be able to access programs that made their debt more manageable.
Flight training alone can cost as much as $80,000 for a four-year degree, not including tuition.
Another mass cancellation program involves remedies when a higher-education program defrauds students or closes down. So if this provision were to pass into law, flight education students who were given worthless degrees that cannot be used for placement into jobs would have no recourse but to pay back those loans they took out under their school’s false pretenses.
The reauthorization bill came out of a bipartisan negotiation and has been pre-conferenced between the House and Senate. Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) are the Democratic co-sponsors on the Senate side. Neither of their offices responded to a request for comment. Sen. Baldwin’s office has also not responded to a request for comment.
Other Senators are unhappy with negotiators including the prohibition on debt forgiveness. “President Biden has cancelled student debt for nearly 4 million Americans, and Republicans in Congress are trying to undermine this life-changing relief through a legislative trick in the FAA bill,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), one of the biggest proponents in Washington of student debt relief. “It’s a shameful political trap that Democrats in Congress need to stand united against and strike from the final bill.”
The Debt Collective, which has been one of the loudest organizers on student debt relief, immediately pounced on the release of the FAA bill, posting that “they’re trying to make relief illegal.” In public comments, the Debt Collective sees the flight education provision as a Trojan horse, where preventing debt relief for pilots by an act of Congress eventually extends to preventing debt relief for all students. Congressional action could also be used in the eventual legal battles on any debt relief program; if Congress weighs in for a small sliver of the student debtor population, judges could use that to say that any debt relief violates the so-called “major questions” doctrine.
More directly, the deal of extending loan capacity for flight education and cutting off any means of escaping that debt conforms with the way policymakers have used student loans for decades. There are two ways to solve the policy problem of a lack of student pilots: provide direct funding to flight education programs so more people can afford to enter classes, or increase the amount of debt that students can take on.
This approach opts for the latter, and then goes a step further by blocking any avenue of escape. The bankruptcy system allows people who cannot afford debts a new start to manage their payments. But student debts are almost entirely excluded from reductions in bankruptcy proceedings, and now under this bill, should it become law, flight education and training loans would be barred from debt relief programs. So students could take out more debt without being able to adjust if personal financial crisis hits.
Flight schools benefit from this, of course, if more students matriculate. But they would also benefit from the loan program whether students had them canceled later or not. Investments in flight education, whether on the backs of government or on the backs of students, still go to the flight schools. The prohibition just means that students must bear all the risk, despite the clear government policy imperative to train more pilots.
“It is the same kind of two-step dance that we’ve seen for decades now,” said Thomas Gokey of the Debt Collective. “Instead of addressing the root causes and proposing real solutions, they take a series of bad non-solutions that make the problem worse.”
