Agreed. Discharge in bankruptcy is the best realistic goal. I’m not willing to do forgiveness unless there is comprehensive overhaul of the lending system — which I don’t think there will be, because the universities and the lenders care more about this than anybody, and they can afford a lot of lobbying clout. Forgiveness without reform is just an invitation to ever-spiraling debt and tuition costs ameliorated by periodic spasms of forgiveness — pretty much the dumbest possible way to manage these things.
So, as Freddie says… make it dischargeable. Then only people really backed into a corner, and willing to take the hit, will get relief.
I'm in the same boat (no pun intended) and my escape hatch is moving to Mexico. Seriously.
I'm on an income-driven repayment plan that is SUPPOSED to forgive the remaining balance after TWENTY-FIVE YEARS of monthly payments that don't even cover the fucking INTEREST. And at the end of that, assuming it actually is forgiven, the IRS will tax the forgiven debt as income. It's obscene.
At the very least, interest rates on federal student loans should be set at 0%.
We felt forced to refinance because of the interest. An average of ~7 percent on $350k really adds up -- there is zero reason for the federal government to demand that extra money just because we can't pay it back instantly.
They were federal, but we refinanced to about 4.5%. The problem is that now the loans are private so we're not eligible for any help -- no pause during the pandemic, no hope of forgiveness, etc. I feel like we were coerced into refinancing by the outrageous interest.
I doubt most of these people racking up debt did so because of their love of learning. I think it's a big problem that college has become the rubber stamp requires for white collar professionals. How do we stop that?
Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 1971 made IQ tests or other employment exams not illegal but certainly more risky if you can't prove that every question is applicable to the job in question. This partially lead to the bachelors degree becoming de jure requirement for many white collar positions despite it not being truly necessary for the vast majority of them. This of course led to an increased market for college degrees and people willing to pay more and more loan opportunities and watering down of most bachelors degrees, etc. Obviously there's a lot more to our current situation but this was certainly a significant piece.
For an idea of alternatives I work in tech and have no degree. What is interesting about this field is that most positions simply do not care about a degree (ranging from level 1 help desk to senior architects) but the vetting process is much different from most other jobs and it's much easier to tell if someone is moving the needle so to speak than in say a random HR job.
It's too much to cover in a comment but for the application process there's often there's a series of stages from the initial application, a phone screen, possibly take home coding assignment (mostly for higher level software engineering positions), and finally at least one onsite interview with a battery of people.
This has been done because it's so hard to hire good people and a college degree in Comp Sci absolutely tells you nothing on whether the person can perform. The second part sounds insane but it's true. The FizzBuzz coding assignment was created to weed out people that can't program a simple loop after 4 years. You can google the details but essentially it's a very simple assignment that you're expected to do on-site (and absolutely should be able to) that helps screen out people that simply can't code that have applied for a programming position.
How easy would this be to do for other white collar positions? Probably pretty hard given the generalist nature of many of those jobs combined with the threat of lawsuit if a question on a general IQ test is deemed to be non-applicable to the job. There are of course companies that exist solely to create relevant job tests to help protect companies from this threat but that merely ups to the cost of hiring people and ultimately running a company which the consumers then pay for.
Point being is that it can be done but as long as companies can rely on kids racking up tons of debt for a shot at a 9-5 office job then they will as there's no reason to do otherwise. If we can put the cost of writing off student loans on the colleges than they will presumably get much pickier about who they take (as they would need people to get good jobs to pay off the loans) and this situation may resolve. Otherwise we're simply pissing into the wind.
What I don’t get is how requiring a bachelor’s degree is any less effectively discriminatory. 35% of whites have a bachelor’s degree, vs 21% of blacks. The high school diploma disparity at the time of Griggs v. Duke Power Co was 34% to 18%.
IQ gap between college grads and general population is less stark… but it’s there. So requiring a degree is almost like an IQ screener that takes four years and $150k to complete. And the people who fail still owe $150k!
You inspired me to look up how student debt is financed and it really does resemble how mortgage debt worked in a lot of ways. Instead of GSEs like Fannie and Freddie, a mix of government entity and private contracts, who then go on to securitize and sell this debt as SLABs. That is to say this debt is no more held by the federal government than mortgages were. There are a lot of hogs getting fat at the trough of student loan debt, and I'd imagine they'd resort to nearly anything to keep getting slopped.
Ironically, going back to school for accounting had been a good decision. I understand money in a massively more sophisticated way now.
I would be pretty surprised if there were *any* really significant debt that did *not* go through some form of securitization. The current perspective of the holders of assets seems to be that originating a loan and then collecting the payout over X years is for chumps. Chumps like the investors they sell to.
I haven't researched this anywhere close to enough to speak authoritatively, but many of the people buying these securities probably have strict regulations on what they can and can't invest in. That's where the guarantee of the federal government comes in, as well as not allowing the debt to be discharged via bankruptcy. This makes all this debt, at least on the surface seem very, very safe. This is also why student loan forgiveness will happen two days after never in our current political system. The idea we live in a democracy is tenuous at best, more like a grand spectacle put on to make people feel like they have a say while the real power never changes hands. Why this is so hard for people to accept is beyond me. No, what you learned in high school civics wasn't very accurate.
Demographic decline/low birth rate spells disaster for college enrollment. Higher education is in for a rough ride in the next decade or two.
I think a lot of our qualms with cancelling debt is not that it's "selfish" to want debt relief - hey, I'd love it if you made my law school debt disappear, that extra money would genuinely be life changing for my family - it's the concern that it's too selfish in favor of some really bad actors.
I think you would find enormous support for debt relief if it was paired with a plan to address any of the fundamental problems with the university system that you touch on. If loans were capped and dischargeable in bankruptcy, if schools were forced to calculate and disclose how much income a graduate could reasonably expect armed with the specific degree they're seeking, if we encouraged more trade schools and just generally made college degrees far less of a requirement for so many jobs, then fuck yeah. But otherwise it feels like too much of a give-away to universities. I mean, what's the long term plan? Are we going to do this every four years?
I mean, the long term plan should be to make public colleges and universities affordable again by legislative action and to abolish the entire federal student loan program.
Stop making students pay for outside speakers and a lot of bells & whistles they don't need or use. At my u. students fees pay for speakers that are essentially TED talks.
Since the 1960s the powerful have been looking for ways to effectively shut down or short circuit the processes that lead to that massive uprising of "the people." Many of the protests then were from college students, most of whom had little debt, very little compared to now. This gave them a lot of freedom. The easiest way to curtail that freedom was to turn them into indentured workers with no way out of the debt but to be indentured workers. There is a reason that of all things on the planet one of the few debts that are not dischargeable in bankruptcy is student loans. It is a feature, not a bug. Given the weakness of the Democrats (from their decision to make sure Bernie and Warren would not be elected and their failure to stop gerrymandering and the long term Republican plan to take over state legislatures long ago when they could have) there is no chance that student loan forgiveness will occur. Those loans are being grouped and sold much like bad mortgages were once upon a time. The biggest investors in them? Colleges, universities, and teacher's unions. The rich don't want debt free students running around disturbing things and that includes a lot of democrats.
I certainly understand the opposition to student debt forgiveness from a self-interested perspective - At 42, I'm the sole earner for my family of four. I've never owned a home, but I did pay off over $60K in student debt. Now you forgive all of these younger families their loans, they buy homes and I continue to watch the price of housing far outpace my ability to save for a decent down payment.
At the same time, of course, I view the country's requirement for and approach higher education, it's costs and debt burden, as a moral abomination and I would welcome total debt relief simply as a much needed correction. (I also have to recognize that I had certain advantages, like access to work and help from my wife in making payments)
To me this is just another example of how our system, particularly when it comes to property/capital ownership, pits people against one another and alienates us from our deeper convictions and common humanity. I now find myself constantly at odds with my close friends and even family member who are property owners in terms of our hopes and interests, and it is very exhausting and dispiriting.
- The need for market pressure of some kind on the price of college. The current confluence of the loan system and the extreme pressure to attend college is a recipe for increases in college tuition that massively outstrip inflation.
- Student debt should be dischargeable via bankruptcy. The availability of *relatively* forgiving bankruptcy is, in the long term, a positive economic influence. (And given the federal government is backing so much of the loan burden, it seems even odder to me that the debts cannot be discharged.)
- The people making decisions as to which institution they will attend are, relative to adults with more real-world experience, far less capable of assessing what it really means to have X amount of debt. That state school or community college starts to look a *lot* better if you can really dig into the numbers and understand what your likely monthly payment will be on graduation....
You know, you're right; I read an article about that on The Atlantic not too long ago, and totally forgot about it. Or maybe it was somewhere else; I can't find the article now.
This is technically true, if you can prove 'undue hardship' but generally you can't prove that as you need to prove (standard varies, but one big one is):
1) that the debtor cannot maintain, based on current income and expenses, a minimal standard of living for the debtor or his or her dependents if forced to repay the loans;
2) that additional circumstances exist indicating that this state of affairs is likely to persist for a significant portion of the repayment period of the student loans; and
3) that the debtor has made good faith efforts to repay the loans.
Note that 'minimal standard of living'. This is not the standard for most other debt, and it's extremely rare for it to actually be discharged.
Student loan 'forgiveness' shouldn't even be considered Left wing.
It is a subsidy for the affluent and financially regressive.
There are 1000 things the Left, if it truly fulfilled its moral obligation to those on the bottom, should put ahead of student loan forgiveness. For example, paying off used car loans would be way more progressive much less expanding Medicaid.
But our 'Left' is one that favors SALT exemptions and paying off professionals college and grad school loans.
I don't have any enthusiasm for it (as an educated professional) and I can't imagine working class voters including Hispanics have any enthusiasm for $50k or $100k give aways as they labor to build businesses and better lives.
The plight of the downwardly mobile urban creative receives outsized attention relative to their actual relevance because they happen to overlap with the thoughtleaders, staffers, etc. of the Democratic party.
I agree that the lumpenintelligentsia of the sort who has a $250k economics degree from BU and works as bartender like AOC has problems, but it's unclear how much the rest of us should really care.
Yeah, ok. But what would be the road map going forward? Make schools liable for non-repayment? Caps on federal loans for schools that go above a certain threshold?
I don't see how you get reform without some significant change in federal funding and as far as I can tell that is a no go because it goes against a critical Democratic contingent. Just seems like pure politics.
Student debt is taken out year over year, and the first year is rarely signed for when the student is less than 18 years old. That is an adult, not a child, and I find it ridiculous to state that they can't take responsibility for what they signed for. Regret I get, abdication I do not.
You’re right. The magic happens at midnight on the final night of the child’s 18th year, making all their decisions well thought out, their brains fully developed, and their dreams and aspirations realistic.
Unless at age 18 you've already learned what it takes to support yourself, the idea of repaying hundreds every month for 20+ years doesn’t have the sting of reality.
I got married two days before age 21. 17 years later we’re still happily married, and still paying off our loans.
I did not consider actual magic to be part of the process. Perhaps that is part of the issue.
Of course not all decisions by 18 (or 17, or 35) year olds will be wise. But 18 is old enough to understand commitment, and to take responsibility for promises made. Teaching them - and the generations to come - that the government will rescue them if they make a mistake is a bad idea.
It is fantastic to hear of your happy marriage. I wish you many more years of happiness, and hope that you pay off the money you borrowed soon, so that you may then fund some of your present day dreams.
I pay $10s of thousands of dollars in NYC and NYS taxes.
That the 'Left' should be looking for a tax break for me is preposterous.
Now, I don't think my tax money is well spent and I don't like paying it. I think NYS and NYC are extremely wasteful and I would like my taxes to go down.
But arguing that should be the job of the Right and not the Left.
SALT is a morally unaceptable subsidy for the wealthiest few percent.
In practice it's worst aspect is that it's politically stupid. It barely, if at all, will help democrats in a fee states they can win without it but provides a huge club against them in purple states and amoungst the poor and working class. Democrats, the party of the wealthy elite is not a great brand for them.
Once again, a huge portion of that debt is a sunken asset--it will *never* be paid off, so there's little reason to even hang on to it. Why not convert that lost money into $X per borrower and forgive it? IIRC even 10k in forgiveness would free millions of people from student debt. That money gets spent in the real economy then, not some paper wonderland of ghost dollars.
Look, if you want to write it off because the system is bad and the system is unfair and blah blah blah blah, well you better fix the system at the same time then.
Higher ed administration is a huge jobs program for an affluent class.
It's easy to make an appeal for getting rid of someone's bills. 'Yay, no bills!'
Much harder to make a case politically for what should be done that goes against an important Democratic faction.
I genuinely understand this regressiveness but feel like a decent society would provide people with all the education they require to fulfill their dreams.
My inclination would be to scale up community colleges to provide much cheaper mass higher education that would clear regulatory barriers and allow people to explore career changing, or technical and career skills and then wiping the debt as a cherry on top.
I think like a left wing society should view college as just as much of a right as like 3rd grade. Yes even including like medical school and dental school and other high earning professionals and we should just tax them much, much more. Massively lower salary premium but more self-improvement.
It's complicated by the fact that we can do debt relief through fiat for next to no cost and we have to compromise on all the other stuff but anything that makes learning cheaper is better in my estimation.
This is *absolutely* a 'Left wing' thing, and a bit of a mask - off moment (is that what the kids are calling it these days?). The demographics divide between who wants and who needs this student loan forgiveness is pretty damn self evident: democrats have a MUCH higher percentage of college educated and graduate studies - the people that owe the most. As Freddie hinted - giving these folks several hundred to several thousand dollars a month in loan forgiveness is probably a direct correlation to bump in funding for the DNC in 5-10 years. Its the same as SALT, except more brazen and instead of both parties scratching backs, its targeted for Democrats only. Its morally corrupt, but hey - self interest is politics, right?
If it were up to me $10k forgiven, federal government no longer guarantees the loans, the schools have to loan themselves the money and people can default if they choose to.
Otherwise the school will have zero incentive to reduce the actual cost, so unless you make it free going forward in twenty years will be at the same place all over again.
Forgiveness would sure be nice, but there are a mountain of other reforms that should be considered as well. I'd really like to have an option to make loan payments pre-tax, for example. Maybe we can cap interest rates. There is a whole world of options available to us, but forgiveness dominates the conversation because it is the most exciting option.
Ugh I am honestly pretty disappointed in this piece. You repeat the fiction, pure unadulterated fiction, that student loan borrowers will die with their debt. It's basically impossible for that to happen, and to repeat it again and again obfuscates the REAL issue surrounding student loans. ALL federal student loans have a moonlight clause. For loans taken prior to 2014 it's 25 years, for loans taken since 2014 it's 20 years. If you switch over to an income-driven plan (which by the way is the only way to not pay the loan off in 25/20 years) the entire remaining balance is forgiven.
Now there IS a huge problem with this - the fed has never stated that the forgiveness is not taxable income, so you are theoretically taxed on the amount forgiven. This is something I doubt ANYONE thinks is okay, but it will never be fixed because people are too busy failing to realize mass forgiveness is already baked into student loan programs.
I worry that I risk getting similarly banned for saying this, but it isn't my intent to be disrespectful in any way, and my confusion is sincere.
The tone-shift of replies recently and the bannings seem really abrupt. (To be clear, this is absolutely *not* me trying to make an untoward implication. I've seen people do that to you a few times on these boards before, and I think it's gross and unacceptable. If anything, you exhibited *more* charity in your handling of that kind of comment than I would have, and I think bannings for that behavior seem eminently reasonable.) I just mean that there seems to be a change in approach that I hadn't seen coming.
I'm not necessarily defending anyone or any comment in particular, but I legitimately don't understand, in some instances, what was specifically beyond-the-pale. I usually enjoy the comments here, and I guess I'm just hoping for clarification on what the expectations for the space are. I thought I had a good intuition of it, but in this case, I don't feel like I understood. Is direct criticism of a piece out-of-bounds?
There's a flashback to my first ever 1L research assignment. Talk about depressing case law to read. Anyone who thinks you're overstating with "almost no one" should go down that rabbit hole and see just how punitive our courts are.
Student debt relief on its own will always be vulnerable to the resentment of those who didn't go to college due to the cost or who already paid their debt off. The best way to make it broadly palatable is for it to be part of a larger set of economic policies. People hate being the brother of the prodigal son, but most of the sting would go away if student debt relief was happening simultaneously with medical debt relief, jobs programs, pay raises, etc.
Yeah, it's hard for me to not see this through the 2021 politics of the PMC party vs everyone else. Perhaps 'the PMC explicitly rewards itself' won't even hurt the left as much politically *because* of that (the people most resentful were already natural fits for what the GOP is selling today, and it could be a catalyst for some college educated moderates shifting parties.) But my guess is that the optics here will be pretty bad and it'll be seen as an unforced error afterwards when people are analyzing why the left lost the working class.
There are many, many, many thousands of people who were first generation college students, went to nondescript state Us, and ended up saddled with huge debts. Did I really need to do an explainer for you about how tiny the number of people who go to elite colleges is?
No, I don't disagree with that and don't even disagree with the moral correctness of forgiving this debt in a vacuum. But I do think that the optics on this are going to be grim and easily used against us, which is to say this should be priced as a cost. Maybe it's worth the cost! We should probably help people once in a while. But we should be honest about what doing something like this is going to do to the Democratic brand among people who didn't go to college.
I would be far more sympathetic to your argument if you placed FAR more emphasis on the grift that is the modern university in the US. The student loan crisis is a direct result of the unfettered explosion in tuition costs resulting from the wide availability of government subsidized student loans. In no world does it make sense to wipe the slate clean without FIRST addressing the scam that is college tuition.
Not saying you never wrote about it. I’m replying to the context of this single post, which implies that student debt forgiveness in itself is a good to be considered as positive in its own right. You brush right past the moral hazard argument as well. If you don’t want to be criticized don’t leave yourself open to such easy criticism.
It seems many comments point to the fact that the system should change along with any forgiveness, and that part of the root cause of the problem is the over-credentialing of white collar jobs. I agree, and I think the following (though I’m using hypothetical numbers) helps with many of the issues of how college is paid for.
Rather than paying for college in cash or with a loan, colleges/trade schools should instead collect 10% of graduate salary for 10 years after graduation. This incentivize the schools to do a few things that are good:
1. Don’t put students in debt they can’t pay back
2. Incentivize schools to make sure students graduate
3. Incentivize schools to help graduates find jobs
4. Don’t over-produce degrees that aren’t needed
5. Helps shift decision making to adults who will make better long term decisions about allocating resources than high school seniors
I didn’t do any real calculations here, so 10% for 10 years is probably not the right amount.
I don't know why everyone seems to think arts and humanities can't get gainful employment in white collar jobs. Of the people I knew from my humanities studies, the vast majority are gainfully employed and fairly well-ensconced in white collar careers. I have a degree in English and work as a business analyst and manager. Others:
- History degree and adult learning consultant / instructional designer
- English degree and software documentation
- English degree and college professor (heh, that's pretty classic I suppose)
- Theatre degree and project manager
If your liberal arts institution teaches you to analyze and communicate effectively (mine did) you can be valuable in many, many contexts as a white collar worker. I'm not saying it's easy; I think STEM is a much more direct path to a high-paying white collar job but sneering at a humanities degree is rather overplayed.
Yeah, it's a myth. As with all things the real advantage is the underlying ability. If you have top 20% ability and a humanities degree you'll outperform someone at the median level of ability with a stem degree.
That makes sense -- smart people can pivot from the low-demand things they learned in college to high-demand skills that they pick up after college. But won't a middling student who spends four years ploddingly learning an in-demand skill be better off than if he or she had spent four years ploddingly learning something the market doesn't want, right? Because that plodding student may not have the flexibility to pursue something better independently.
(Perhaps the real answer is, don't force plodding students to go to college as a minimum job requirement.)
Do you have an article on hand for that? If so, I'd be really interested.
I find this counter-intuitive because many job descriptions demand a certain degree and promotion/ladder-climbing in corporations seems more based on internal politicking/ brand-building/visibility etc than anything I'd consider to be underlying ability.
I have a PhD in philosophy and make six figures as a think tank consultant, most of my coworkers have humanities degrees . . . obviously anecdotal but I dunno
Yes I agree completely. I had that in my post due to it being the most common objection people give to my suggestion. I have edited it out because as you say - it is extremely overplayed.
I had to unlearn some school communication skills lol. I remember digging up my college essays and seeing statements like "X says Y, but Y is wrong because of facts A and B." I would never say something like that in business. You have to coat disagreement in a weird way to make everything seem agreeable.
I'm not talking about five paragraph essays. I'm talking about college philosophy papers where I analyzed the argument and presented counterarguments without any fluff. If you do that in the private sector, you'll get marked as having a bad attitude in 5 seconds.
Like most communications, it depends on your audience and the context of the communication. Naturally the tone you strike is likely to be different in business than it is in academic contexts.
Today? Probably not all that much worse. When I started out? Considerably worse. My writing and thinking skills both matured quite a bit during college.
Where I worked at the time? It would have been a disaster as I was shoved into the deep end of the pool. But I don't know that we can extrapolate from that. At a less chaotic workplace with better training and support systems, I may have been able to learn on the job sufficiently to actually perform the job.
I will say, though, that the skills I learned analyzing literature were quite similar to the skills I use in the course of systems analysis at work. Close reading text, pulling in the larger context, drawing conclusions from observations I used in school translate quite well to business systems.
When I finally paid off my student loans in my mid-30s, I gathered my two small children around the fireplace to ceremonially burn the last promissory note, explaining to them as I did about borrowing money for important purposes and, more importantly, about the importance of paying back what you owe. So, while I couldn't agree more about the negative effects of all that loan cash sloshing around college administrations, I don't think "moral hazard" comes close to describing the horrible lesson we'll be teaching our grandchildren if we just "wave a magic wand" as you suggest. By all means reform the system, and provide relief for students who were actually defrauded, but let's not undermine yet another aspect of responsible adulthood in the process.
Four years ago we waved a magic wand and made hundreds of billions of dollars of taxes for the wealthy disappear. Did you gather your children around the fire then.
Why not? We control the world's fiat currency and have the power of the printing press. You can pay higher taxes, but absolutely, I'll forgive your loans.
Run the printing presses and seniors with fixed incomes and working class families see the price of chicken double. Meanwhile I'll be ok because my net worth sits inflation proof assets. Think I care how much hamburger meat costs or whether my fixed income just went down in value?
There are finite resources and the order of priorities should have some basic moral framework.
To resonate the Left can't just be about handing out candy and MMT fantasies.
Fed didn't seem to have trouble running the printing presses to buy up 4 trillion in bad loan securities from the investment banks. I don't recall chicken prices doubling then (nor have they recently, despite supply constraints). Just think of it as quantitative easing for a purpose other than bailing out the financial elites.
And I'm not sure how you determined that there was no place in the 'order of priorities' for freeing up spendable income for the young educated graphic. Seems like there would be some virtuous feedback in the form of home and car buying and such. The money would be going back into the economy.
How exactly does letting people keep more of the money they earn by lowering taxes equate to favoring one group of debtors over others by forgiving their debts (and covering the deficit with taxes paid by their fellow citizens)? If the issue is basic equity, why not start with the credit card debt or car loans of lower income people, most of whom never had the luxury of college?
Sounds like a real magic wand, then. If those are lying around, in the form of political policies that change lives, maybe we should be looking for them.
The people affected will be adults in their 20s and 30s. Are they stupid? Will they suddenly conclude that debt isn't real? This is hardly the collapse of the financial system, your grandchildren will be up to their eyeballs in mortgages and car payments and credit card debt, just like every other American.
Many societies have functioned just fine for hundreds of years with various forms of debt forgiveness (jubilee years, etc.). People will still have other debts and continue to pay them. This is one kind that got systematically out of control and it's in all of our interests to recognize that and end it.
One thing I'm trying to teach my children is that life isn't always fair and that you don't do the right thing because you expect it to be.
I paid my student debts off over 20 years ago. But my response to "I got screwed over then" is not "so other people should get screwed over now". Because I don't think it's a good one.
But again, free college for the deserving would obviate the need for debt in the first place.
Agreed. Discharge in bankruptcy is the best realistic goal. I’m not willing to do forgiveness unless there is comprehensive overhaul of the lending system — which I don’t think there will be, because the universities and the lenders care more about this than anybody, and they can afford a lot of lobbying clout. Forgiveness without reform is just an invitation to ever-spiraling debt and tuition costs ameliorated by periodic spasms of forgiveness — pretty much the dumbest possible way to manage these things.
So, as Freddie says… make it dischargeable. Then only people really backed into a corner, and willing to take the hit, will get relief.
I appreciate your comment and I generally reserve my opprobrium for the institutions:
On what rational and moral basis are these universities offering expensive degrees in things like social work that people have no means of paying off?
It's abhorrent and demonstrates that they've totally abrograted their social responsibility.
I'm in the same boat (no pun intended) and my escape hatch is moving to Mexico. Seriously.
I'm on an income-driven repayment plan that is SUPPOSED to forgive the remaining balance after TWENTY-FIVE YEARS of monthly payments that don't even cover the fucking INTEREST. And at the end of that, assuming it actually is forgiven, the IRS will tax the forgiven debt as income. It's obscene.
At the very least, interest rates on federal student loans should be set at 0%.
"At the very least, interest rates on federal student loans should be set at 0%."
I can get behind this, too, or some extremely nominal amount. 6-8 percent (as was the going rate when I was wearing an onion on my belt) is absurd.
We felt forced to refinance because of the interest. An average of ~7 percent on $350k really adds up -- there is zero reason for the federal government to demand that extra money just because we can't pay it back instantly.
They were federal, but we refinanced to about 4.5%. The problem is that now the loans are private so we're not eligible for any help -- no pause during the pandemic, no hope of forgiveness, etc. I feel like we were coerced into refinancing by the outrageous interest.
Agree on interest.
No, you weren't stupid. Sometimes you want to do good (SW) and don't think at the time how it ends up.
I doubt most of these people racking up debt did so because of their love of learning. I think it's a big problem that college has become the rubber stamp requires for white collar professionals. How do we stop that?
Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 1971 made IQ tests or other employment exams not illegal but certainly more risky if you can't prove that every question is applicable to the job in question. This partially lead to the bachelors degree becoming de jure requirement for many white collar positions despite it not being truly necessary for the vast majority of them. This of course led to an increased market for college degrees and people willing to pay more and more loan opportunities and watering down of most bachelors degrees, etc. Obviously there's a lot more to our current situation but this was certainly a significant piece.
For an idea of alternatives I work in tech and have no degree. What is interesting about this field is that most positions simply do not care about a degree (ranging from level 1 help desk to senior architects) but the vetting process is much different from most other jobs and it's much easier to tell if someone is moving the needle so to speak than in say a random HR job.
It's too much to cover in a comment but for the application process there's often there's a series of stages from the initial application, a phone screen, possibly take home coding assignment (mostly for higher level software engineering positions), and finally at least one onsite interview with a battery of people.
This has been done because it's so hard to hire good people and a college degree in Comp Sci absolutely tells you nothing on whether the person can perform. The second part sounds insane but it's true. The FizzBuzz coding assignment was created to weed out people that can't program a simple loop after 4 years. You can google the details but essentially it's a very simple assignment that you're expected to do on-site (and absolutely should be able to) that helps screen out people that simply can't code that have applied for a programming position.
How easy would this be to do for other white collar positions? Probably pretty hard given the generalist nature of many of those jobs combined with the threat of lawsuit if a question on a general IQ test is deemed to be non-applicable to the job. There are of course companies that exist solely to create relevant job tests to help protect companies from this threat but that merely ups to the cost of hiring people and ultimately running a company which the consumers then pay for.
Point being is that it can be done but as long as companies can rely on kids racking up tons of debt for a shot at a 9-5 office job then they will as there's no reason to do otherwise. If we can put the cost of writing off student loans on the colleges than they will presumably get much pickier about who they take (as they would need people to get good jobs to pay off the loans) and this situation may resolve. Otherwise we're simply pissing into the wind.
What I don’t get is how requiring a bachelor’s degree is any less effectively discriminatory. 35% of whites have a bachelor’s degree, vs 21% of blacks. The high school diploma disparity at the time of Griggs v. Duke Power Co was 34% to 18%.
IQ gap between college grads and general population is less stark… but it’s there. So requiring a degree is almost like an IQ screener that takes four years and $150k to complete. And the people who fail still owe $150k!
You inspired me to look up how student debt is financed and it really does resemble how mortgage debt worked in a lot of ways. Instead of GSEs like Fannie and Freddie, a mix of government entity and private contracts, who then go on to securitize and sell this debt as SLABs. That is to say this debt is no more held by the federal government than mortgages were. There are a lot of hogs getting fat at the trough of student loan debt, and I'd imagine they'd resort to nearly anything to keep getting slopped.
Ironically, going back to school for accounting had been a good decision. I understand money in a massively more sophisticated way now.
I would be pretty surprised if there were *any* really significant debt that did *not* go through some form of securitization. The current perspective of the holders of assets seems to be that originating a loan and then collecting the payout over X years is for chumps. Chumps like the investors they sell to.
I haven't researched this anywhere close to enough to speak authoritatively, but many of the people buying these securities probably have strict regulations on what they can and can't invest in. That's where the guarantee of the federal government comes in, as well as not allowing the debt to be discharged via bankruptcy. This makes all this debt, at least on the surface seem very, very safe. This is also why student loan forgiveness will happen two days after never in our current political system. The idea we live in a democracy is tenuous at best, more like a grand spectacle put on to make people feel like they have a say while the real power never changes hands. Why this is so hard for people to accept is beyond me. No, what you learned in high school civics wasn't very accurate.
Demographic decline/low birth rate spells disaster for college enrollment. Higher education is in for a rough ride in the next decade or two.
I think a lot of our qualms with cancelling debt is not that it's "selfish" to want debt relief - hey, I'd love it if you made my law school debt disappear, that extra money would genuinely be life changing for my family - it's the concern that it's too selfish in favor of some really bad actors.
I think you would find enormous support for debt relief if it was paired with a plan to address any of the fundamental problems with the university system that you touch on. If loans were capped and dischargeable in bankruptcy, if schools were forced to calculate and disclose how much income a graduate could reasonably expect armed with the specific degree they're seeking, if we encouraged more trade schools and just generally made college degrees far less of a requirement for so many jobs, then fuck yeah. But otherwise it feels like too much of a give-away to universities. I mean, what's the long term plan? Are we going to do this every four years?
I mean, the long term plan should be to make public colleges and universities affordable again by legislative action and to abolish the entire federal student loan program.
Stop making students pay for outside speakers and a lot of bells & whistles they don't need or use. At my u. students fees pay for speakers that are essentially TED talks.
Since the 1960s the powerful have been looking for ways to effectively shut down or short circuit the processes that lead to that massive uprising of "the people." Many of the protests then were from college students, most of whom had little debt, very little compared to now. This gave them a lot of freedom. The easiest way to curtail that freedom was to turn them into indentured workers with no way out of the debt but to be indentured workers. There is a reason that of all things on the planet one of the few debts that are not dischargeable in bankruptcy is student loans. It is a feature, not a bug. Given the weakness of the Democrats (from their decision to make sure Bernie and Warren would not be elected and their failure to stop gerrymandering and the long term Republican plan to take over state legislatures long ago when they could have) there is no chance that student loan forgiveness will occur. Those loans are being grouped and sold much like bad mortgages were once upon a time. The biggest investors in them? Colleges, universities, and teacher's unions. The rich don't want debt free students running around disturbing things and that includes a lot of democrats.
I certainly understand the opposition to student debt forgiveness from a self-interested perspective - At 42, I'm the sole earner for my family of four. I've never owned a home, but I did pay off over $60K in student debt. Now you forgive all of these younger families their loans, they buy homes and I continue to watch the price of housing far outpace my ability to save for a decent down payment.
At the same time, of course, I view the country's requirement for and approach higher education, it's costs and debt burden, as a moral abomination and I would welcome total debt relief simply as a much needed correction. (I also have to recognize that I had certain advantages, like access to work and help from my wife in making payments)
To me this is just another example of how our system, particularly when it comes to property/capital ownership, pits people against one another and alienates us from our deeper convictions and common humanity. I now find myself constantly at odds with my close friends and even family member who are property owners in terms of our hopes and interests, and it is very exhausting and dispiriting.
This hits all the high points for me:
- The need for market pressure of some kind on the price of college. The current confluence of the loan system and the extreme pressure to attend college is a recipe for increases in college tuition that massively outstrip inflation.
- Student debt should be dischargeable via bankruptcy. The availability of *relatively* forgiving bankruptcy is, in the long term, a positive economic influence. (And given the federal government is backing so much of the loan burden, it seems even odder to me that the debts cannot be discharged.)
- The people making decisions as to which institution they will attend are, relative to adults with more real-world experience, far less capable of assessing what it really means to have X amount of debt. That state school or community college starts to look a *lot* better if you can really dig into the numbers and understand what your likely monthly payment will be on graduation....
Student loan is dischargeable in bankruptcy. I have no idea how that myth started but it's entirely fictitious.
You know, you're right; I read an article about that on The Atlantic not too long ago, and totally forgot about it. Or maybe it was somewhere else; I can't find the article now.
Technically yes -- practically no for most people. I think what people are shorthanding here is "dischargeable on the same basis as other debt."
This is technically true, if you can prove 'undue hardship' but generally you can't prove that as you need to prove (standard varies, but one big one is):
1) that the debtor cannot maintain, based on current income and expenses, a minimal standard of living for the debtor or his or her dependents if forced to repay the loans;
2) that additional circumstances exist indicating that this state of affairs is likely to persist for a significant portion of the repayment period of the student loans; and
3) that the debtor has made good faith efforts to repay the loans.
Note that 'minimal standard of living'. This is not the standard for most other debt, and it's extremely rare for it to actually be discharged.
Totally disagree.
Student loan 'forgiveness' shouldn't even be considered Left wing.
It is a subsidy for the affluent and financially regressive.
There are 1000 things the Left, if it truly fulfilled its moral obligation to those on the bottom, should put ahead of student loan forgiveness. For example, paying off used car loans would be way more progressive much less expanding Medicaid.
But our 'Left' is one that favors SALT exemptions and paying off professionals college and grad school loans.
I don't have any enthusiasm for it (as an educated professional) and I can't imagine working class voters including Hispanics have any enthusiasm for $50k or $100k give aways as they labor to build businesses and better lives.
The plight of the downwardly mobile urban creative receives outsized attention relative to their actual relevance because they happen to overlap with the thoughtleaders, staffers, etc. of the Democratic party.
I agree that the lumpenintelligentsia of the sort who has a $250k economics degree from BU and works as bartender like AOC has problems, but it's unclear how much the rest of us should really care.
The rich people with expensive houses bought them knowing about the tax burden. Why should we bail them out with SALT reform?
The people that took out student loans knew they had to repay them. Why should we bail them out with loan forgiveness?
See how that works?
Like Freddie said, this huge burden is being sold to people too young and inexperienced to truly get what they’re agreeing to.
I agree, but isn't the problem the institutions?
Yes. It has to be both. But reforming the institutions takes time. Throwing a financial life ring to people in their 20s and 30s can be immediate.
Yeah, ok. But what would be the road map going forward? Make schools liable for non-repayment? Caps on federal loans for schools that go above a certain threshold?
I don't see how you get reform without some significant change in federal funding and as far as I can tell that is a no go because it goes against a critical Democratic contingent. Just seems like pure politics.
Student debt is taken out year over year, and the first year is rarely signed for when the student is less than 18 years old. That is an adult, not a child, and I find it ridiculous to state that they can't take responsibility for what they signed for. Regret I get, abdication I do not.
You’re right. The magic happens at midnight on the final night of the child’s 18th year, making all their decisions well thought out, their brains fully developed, and their dreams and aspirations realistic.
Unless at age 18 you've already learned what it takes to support yourself, the idea of repaying hundreds every month for 20+ years doesn’t have the sting of reality.
I got married two days before age 21. 17 years later we’re still happily married, and still paying off our loans.
I did not consider actual magic to be part of the process. Perhaps that is part of the issue.
Of course not all decisions by 18 (or 17, or 35) year olds will be wise. But 18 is old enough to understand commitment, and to take responsibility for promises made. Teaching them - and the generations to come - that the government will rescue them if they make a mistake is a bad idea.
It is fantastic to hear of your happy marriage. I wish you many more years of happiness, and hope that you pay off the money you borrowed soon, so that you may then fund some of your present day dreams.
We should not bail them out with SALT reform.
I pay $10s of thousands of dollars in NYC and NYS taxes.
That the 'Left' should be looking for a tax break for me is preposterous.
Now, I don't think my tax money is well spent and I don't like paying it. I think NYS and NYC are extremely wasteful and I would like my taxes to go down.
But arguing that should be the job of the Right and not the Left.
Most of them bought those houses when the taxes were deductible.
SALT is a morally unaceptable subsidy for the wealthiest few percent.
In practice it's worst aspect is that it's politically stupid. It barely, if at all, will help democrats in a fee states they can win without it but provides a huge club against them in purple states and amoungst the poor and working class. Democrats, the party of the wealthy elite is not a great brand for them.
Once again, a huge portion of that debt is a sunken asset--it will *never* be paid off, so there's little reason to even hang on to it. Why not convert that lost money into $X per borrower and forgive it? IIRC even 10k in forgiveness would free millions of people from student debt. That money gets spent in the real economy then, not some paper wonderland of ghost dollars.
A lot of it will be paid off.
Look, if you want to write it off because the system is bad and the system is unfair and blah blah blah blah, well you better fix the system at the same time then.
Higher ed administration is a huge jobs program for an affluent class.
It's easy to make an appeal for getting rid of someone's bills. 'Yay, no bills!'
Much harder to make a case politically for what should be done that goes against an important Democratic faction.
The entire point is that the vast majority of the debt will never be paid off. I recommend you read the linked article, it's eye opening.
A lot of money will be paid back in.
I genuinely understand this regressiveness but feel like a decent society would provide people with all the education they require to fulfill their dreams.
My inclination would be to scale up community colleges to provide much cheaper mass higher education that would clear regulatory barriers and allow people to explore career changing, or technical and career skills and then wiping the debt as a cherry on top.
I think like a left wing society should view college as just as much of a right as like 3rd grade. Yes even including like medical school and dental school and other high earning professionals and we should just tax them much, much more. Massively lower salary premium but more self-improvement.
It's complicated by the fact that we can do debt relief through fiat for next to no cost and we have to compromise on all the other stuff but anything that makes learning cheaper is better in my estimation.
This is *absolutely* a 'Left wing' thing, and a bit of a mask - off moment (is that what the kids are calling it these days?). The demographics divide between who wants and who needs this student loan forgiveness is pretty damn self evident: democrats have a MUCH higher percentage of college educated and graduate studies - the people that owe the most. As Freddie hinted - giving these folks several hundred to several thousand dollars a month in loan forgiveness is probably a direct correlation to bump in funding for the DNC in 5-10 years. Its the same as SALT, except more brazen and instead of both parties scratching backs, its targeted for Democrats only. Its morally corrupt, but hey - self interest is politics, right?
Or maybe I'm being extra cynical today.
If it were up to me $10k forgiven, federal government no longer guarantees the loans, the schools have to loan themselves the money and people can default if they choose to.
Otherwise the school will have zero incentive to reduce the actual cost, so unless you make it free going forward in twenty years will be at the same place all over again.
Forgiveness would sure be nice, but there are a mountain of other reforms that should be considered as well. I'd really like to have an option to make loan payments pre-tax, for example. Maybe we can cap interest rates. There is a whole world of options available to us, but forgiveness dominates the conversation because it is the most exciting option.
Ugh I am honestly pretty disappointed in this piece. You repeat the fiction, pure unadulterated fiction, that student loan borrowers will die with their debt. It's basically impossible for that to happen, and to repeat it again and again obfuscates the REAL issue surrounding student loans. ALL federal student loans have a moonlight clause. For loans taken prior to 2014 it's 25 years, for loans taken since 2014 it's 20 years. If you switch over to an income-driven plan (which by the way is the only way to not pay the loan off in 25/20 years) the entire remaining balance is forgiven.
Now there IS a huge problem with this - the fed has never stated that the forgiveness is not taxable income, so you are theoretically taxed on the amount forgiven. This is something I doubt ANYONE thinks is okay, but it will never be fixed because people are too busy failing to realize mass forgiveness is already baked into student loan programs.
Let me please make it clear to you and everyone else here that I don't give a single miserable fuck what you find disappointing.
You are all getting far too comfortable in this space, and assume far too much. And I will start clearing people out if I feel moved to do so.
I worry that I risk getting similarly banned for saying this, but it isn't my intent to be disrespectful in any way, and my confusion is sincere.
The tone-shift of replies recently and the bannings seem really abrupt. (To be clear, this is absolutely *not* me trying to make an untoward implication. I've seen people do that to you a few times on these boards before, and I think it's gross and unacceptable. If anything, you exhibited *more* charity in your handling of that kind of comment than I would have, and I think bannings for that behavior seem eminently reasonable.) I just mean that there seems to be a change in approach that I hadn't seen coming.
I'm not necessarily defending anyone or any comment in particular, but I legitimately don't understand, in some instances, what was specifically beyond-the-pale. I usually enjoy the comments here, and I guess I'm just hoping for clarification on what the expectations for the space are. I thought I had a good intuition of it, but in this case, I don't feel like I understood. Is direct criticism of a piece out-of-bounds?
Also student loans ARE dischargeable in bankruptcy! This piece could have desperately used some basic student-loan fact-checking.
No, it's not. A moonlight provision several decades is not bankruptcy. And check your fucking tone, in my house.
Almost no one qualifies for undue burden in these cases. You were warned.
There's a flashback to my first ever 1L research assignment. Talk about depressing case law to read. Anyone who thinks you're overstating with "almost no one" should go down that rabbit hole and see just how punitive our courts are.
Student debt relief on its own will always be vulnerable to the resentment of those who didn't go to college due to the cost or who already paid their debt off. The best way to make it broadly palatable is for it to be part of a larger set of economic policies. People hate being the brother of the prodigal son, but most of the sting would go away if student debt relief was happening simultaneously with medical debt relief, jobs programs, pay raises, etc.
Yeah, it's hard for me to not see this through the 2021 politics of the PMC party vs everyone else. Perhaps 'the PMC explicitly rewards itself' won't even hurt the left as much politically *because* of that (the people most resentful were already natural fits for what the GOP is selling today, and it could be a catalyst for some college educated moderates shifting parties.) But my guess is that the optics here will be pretty bad and it'll be seen as an unforced error afterwards when people are analyzing why the left lost the working class.
There are many, many, many thousands of people who were first generation college students, went to nondescript state Us, and ended up saddled with huge debts. Did I really need to do an explainer for you about how tiny the number of people who go to elite colleges is?
No, I don't disagree with that and don't even disagree with the moral correctness of forgiving this debt in a vacuum. But I do think that the optics on this are going to be grim and easily used against us, which is to say this should be priced as a cost. Maybe it's worth the cost! We should probably help people once in a while. But we should be honest about what doing something like this is going to do to the Democratic brand among people who didn't go to college.
I would be far more sympathetic to your argument if you placed FAR more emphasis on the grift that is the modern university in the US. The student loan crisis is a direct result of the unfettered explosion in tuition costs resulting from the wide availability of government subsidized student loans. In no world does it make sense to wipe the slate clean without FIRST addressing the scam that is college tuition.
It's a money laundering enterprise where taxpayer dollars go to fund absurd bureaucracies and which are later clawed back from former students.
Only in America.
Yeah it's true, I've never written a word about colleges being a big scam. I didn't write an entire book on that theme.
Not saying you never wrote about it. I’m replying to the context of this single post, which implies that student debt forgiveness in itself is a good to be considered as positive in its own right. You brush right past the moral hazard argument as well. If you don’t want to be criticized don’t leave yourself open to such easy criticism.
Oh don't worry, your attempts here could never reach the status of criticism for me.
No, I’m sure that’s the case. No reason for you to reflect on your firmly held beliefs regarding decisions and consequences.
i.e., selective demand for rigor.
It seems many comments point to the fact that the system should change along with any forgiveness, and that part of the root cause of the problem is the over-credentialing of white collar jobs. I agree, and I think the following (though I’m using hypothetical numbers) helps with many of the issues of how college is paid for.
Rather than paying for college in cash or with a loan, colleges/trade schools should instead collect 10% of graduate salary for 10 years after graduation. This incentivize the schools to do a few things that are good:
1. Don’t put students in debt they can’t pay back
2. Incentivize schools to make sure students graduate
3. Incentivize schools to help graduates find jobs
4. Don’t over-produce degrees that aren’t needed
5. Helps shift decision making to adults who will make better long term decisions about allocating resources than high school seniors
I didn’t do any real calculations here, so 10% for 10 years is probably not the right amount.
I don't know why everyone seems to think arts and humanities can't get gainful employment in white collar jobs. Of the people I knew from my humanities studies, the vast majority are gainfully employed and fairly well-ensconced in white collar careers. I have a degree in English and work as a business analyst and manager. Others:
- History degree and adult learning consultant / instructional designer
- English degree and software documentation
- English degree and college professor (heh, that's pretty classic I suppose)
- Theatre degree and project manager
If your liberal arts institution teaches you to analyze and communicate effectively (mine did) you can be valuable in many, many contexts as a white collar worker. I'm not saying it's easy; I think STEM is a much more direct path to a high-paying white collar job but sneering at a humanities degree is rather overplayed.
Yeah, it's a myth. As with all things the real advantage is the underlying ability. If you have top 20% ability and a humanities degree you'll outperform someone at the median level of ability with a stem degree.
That makes sense -- smart people can pivot from the low-demand things they learned in college to high-demand skills that they pick up after college. But won't a middling student who spends four years ploddingly learning an in-demand skill be better off than if he or she had spent four years ploddingly learning something the market doesn't want, right? Because that plodding student may not have the flexibility to pursue something better independently.
(Perhaps the real answer is, don't force plodding students to go to college as a minimum job requirement.)
Do you have an article on hand for that? If so, I'd be really interested.
I find this counter-intuitive because many job descriptions demand a certain degree and promotion/ladder-climbing in corporations seems more based on internal politicking/ brand-building/visibility etc than anything I'd consider to be underlying ability.
I have a PhD in philosophy and make six figures as a think tank consultant, most of my coworkers have humanities degrees . . . obviously anecdotal but I dunno
Yes I agree completely. I had that in my post due to it being the most common objection people give to my suggestion. I have edited it out because as you say - it is extremely overplayed.
"If your liberal arts institution teaches you to analyze and communicate effectively (mine did) "
How much worse would you be as a business analyst and manager if you'd just gone directly from high school to your current line of work?
I had to unlearn some school communication skills lol. I remember digging up my college essays and seeing statements like "X says Y, but Y is wrong because of facts A and B." I would never say something like that in business. You have to coat disagreement in a weird way to make everything seem agreeable.
I'm not talking about five paragraph essays. I'm talking about college philosophy papers where I analyzed the argument and presented counterarguments without any fluff. If you do that in the private sector, you'll get marked as having a bad attitude in 5 seconds.
Like most communications, it depends on your audience and the context of the communication. Naturally the tone you strike is likely to be different in business than it is in academic contexts.
Today? Probably not all that much worse. When I started out? Considerably worse. My writing and thinking skills both matured quite a bit during college.
Is it possible they would have matured about as well in the work world?
Where I worked at the time? It would have been a disaster as I was shoved into the deep end of the pool. But I don't know that we can extrapolate from that. At a less chaotic workplace with better training and support systems, I may have been able to learn on the job sufficiently to actually perform the job.
I will say, though, that the skills I learned analyzing literature were quite similar to the skills I use in the course of systems analysis at work. Close reading text, pulling in the larger context, drawing conclusions from observations I used in school translate quite well to business systems.
I think his point is this: you could have learned those skills in a less expensive and less time consuming institution.
When I finally paid off my student loans in my mid-30s, I gathered my two small children around the fireplace to ceremonially burn the last promissory note, explaining to them as I did about borrowing money for important purposes and, more importantly, about the importance of paying back what you owe. So, while I couldn't agree more about the negative effects of all that loan cash sloshing around college administrations, I don't think "moral hazard" comes close to describing the horrible lesson we'll be teaching our grandchildren if we just "wave a magic wand" as you suggest. By all means reform the system, and provide relief for students who were actually defrauded, but let's not undermine yet another aspect of responsible adulthood in the process.
Four years ago we waved a magic wand and made hundreds of billions of dollars of taxes for the wealthy disappear. Did you gather your children around the fire then.
I have a <1% income do you want my loans to go away?
Why not? We control the world's fiat currency and have the power of the printing press. You can pay higher taxes, but absolutely, I'll forgive your loans.
Money comes from somewhere.
Run the printing presses and seniors with fixed incomes and working class families see the price of chicken double. Meanwhile I'll be ok because my net worth sits inflation proof assets. Think I care how much hamburger meat costs or whether my fixed income just went down in value?
There are finite resources and the order of priorities should have some basic moral framework.
To resonate the Left can't just be about handing out candy and MMT fantasies.
Fed didn't seem to have trouble running the printing presses to buy up 4 trillion in bad loan securities from the investment banks. I don't recall chicken prices doubling then (nor have they recently, despite supply constraints). Just think of it as quantitative easing for a purpose other than bailing out the financial elites.
And I'm not sure how you determined that there was no place in the 'order of priorities' for freeing up spendable income for the young educated graphic. Seems like there would be some virtuous feedback in the form of home and car buying and such. The money would be going back into the economy.
I don't buy any of this.
Think how much spendable income we could free up if we forgave their house and car payments, too!
New slogan: EVERYTHING FORGIVEN, INFINITE GROWTH.
How exactly does letting people keep more of the money they earn by lowering taxes equate to favoring one group of debtors over others by forgiving their debts (and covering the deficit with taxes paid by their fellow citizens)? If the issue is basic equity, why not start with the credit card debt or car loans of lower income people, most of whom never had the luxury of college?
Yes, but it was a trash can fire.
Sounds like a real magic wand, then. If those are lying around, in the form of political policies that change lives, maybe we should be looking for them.
The people affected will be adults in their 20s and 30s. Are they stupid? Will they suddenly conclude that debt isn't real? This is hardly the collapse of the financial system, your grandchildren will be up to their eyeballs in mortgages and car payments and credit card debt, just like every other American.
Many societies have functioned just fine for hundreds of years with various forms of debt forgiveness (jubilee years, etc.). People will still have other debts and continue to pay them. This is one kind that got systematically out of control and it's in all of our interests to recognize that and end it.
One thing I'm trying to teach my children is that life isn't always fair and that you don't do the right thing because you expect it to be.
I paid my student debts off over 20 years ago. But my response to "I got screwed over then" is not "so other people should get screwed over now". Because I don't think it's a good one.
But again, free college for the deserving would obviate the need for debt in the first place.