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Do you guys read nothing that I write? How many times have I told you that a very small percentage of degree holders went to elite colleges? Less than 30% of American universities reject more students than they accept, and those that do are on average far smaller than their less selective counterparts. And the debtholders are even less represented by such students because (surprise surprise) a huge percentage of them come from means and don't have to take on debt. Yet all I'm seeing here is comment after comment that presumes that college graduates are all pampered elites who have tons of social capital! There are untold hundreds of thousands of people of marginal ability who attended revolving door colleges and took on ungodly debt to get low-value degrees, and they did so because they were told by their society, relentlessly, that they had to. And yet you dismiss them as feckless elites.

What a disappointment you are.

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I spent 8 years in the army because I grew up poor and thought I had no other options. I used the GI Bill to pay for college. It's very hard for me not to feel resentment if these people just have their loans forgiven. I don't want to feel this way but I do. I literally risked my life to go to college.

I'm all for forgiveness if there some work done to fix the causes of this problem in the first place and if the people who are getting their loans forgiven spend a few years in the military or teaching in poor school districts or do some sort of service. (maybe have them teach the importance of good financial decisions to new college students).

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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?

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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.

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Dec 22, 2021·edited Dec 22, 2021

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?

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I see plenty of people in the comments discussing soaring tuition. How is the role of the federal government not under review here? If banks had to actually vet the people they give student loans to there's no way that most of them would ever qualify, especially for six figure loans to study Sanskrit.

The only reason this system works is because the government guarantees those loans. That's why they can't be discharged in bankruptcy. Ironically the drive to enroll as many students as possible has backfired in stunning fashion. I think a lot of people qualify as conservatives precisely because of things like this, where an attempt to do one specific thing results in lots of unforeseen consequences.

Get rid of the federal guarantee for student loans. Almost instantly the number of people who can actually qualify for six figure degrees will evaporate and colleges and universities will be forced into cost cutting in order to offer lower tuitions.

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Dec 22, 2021·edited Dec 22, 2021

Like others have written, without solid reform in higher-ed funding itself, debt forgiveness won't solve the problem for good. It will only delay it for a little while.

I agree that some form of forgiveness would really help, perhaps something portional and incremental that isn't just a giant wave-of-the-hand magic trick. But as I see it, the colossal cost of modern education needs a few things to bring down costs:

1) A return to historic levels of state funding for state schools. This may be controversial to some, but there's oodles of evidence that state funding has been on a long, slow decline since the '80's.

2) Deep cuts to administrative staff. This is a no-brainer, but also likely the most difficult to achieve. There's a really entrenched belief in the need for such a large admin in higher-ed, and many careers have and are built upon it. It's going to be very hard to convince them to start making the necessary cuts here.

3) Textbook price controls. As anyone who has had to purchase class materials these days can attest to, textbook prices are really insane these days. From what I understand this 'industry' is controlled by only a few publishers. And they ain't gonna give up this cash cow without a fight.

4) Trade schools, trade schools, trade schools. I don't know why these are viewed with such contempt by higher-ed peeps, but that sentiment is asinine. Not only is regular college NOT for everyone, it in no way should be. The demand for electricians, plumbers, IT experts, etc. is off the charts these days. And given that everyone and their mom (literally) thinks their kid HAS to go to a 4-year university, that is not a realistic position to take. But this can only work if the business world is willing to employ these people as well. Credentialism is an ugly monster, and there's no good reason why trade school diplomas can't be seen as just as valuable as one from a regular university.

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The borrowers walked into these agreements as adults. They made adult decisions as free people. Once we begin relieving adults of the responsibility of their choices, we discover the need to limit an adult's ability to make their own choices. This begins to devolve down into a big nanny society where nanny tells you what's best for you, and you accept nanny's decisions. There goes your pro-choice decisions down the drain.

We told our three children that we would pay for two years of state university if they completed their lower division work at the local community college. That plan worked for us. Since both my wife and I worked our own way through community college and we used our savings for our own education at the local state university, and since we took the low road on our children's educations, I have a very hard time seeing us and our children paying for the excesses of the more profligate members of society.

At some level, a fancy degree differs little from high caste bling ... and you expect me to pay for your high caste bling.

Of course you'll never be able to separate the high caste university system from their federally backed gravy train. So should the consequences of poor decision making fall upon the innocent, or the guilty?

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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.

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founding

My wife started her career with $350k in student loans (medical school). We calculated that, with interest, we will pay almost half a million dollars for her education. Our minimum payment is $4000 per month.

We refinanced because the government’s interest rates were ridiculous, and converting the loans to private will save us something like $30k in the long run. But of course it was a gamble: If they forgive government loans, we’re SOL. Sofi wouldn’t even pause payments during the pandemic, citing obligations to their shareholders. With private loans there’s no help at all.

So I viscerally understand how much it will suck if they forgive federal debt but don’t help us. Or the people who just finished paying six-figure loans. Or the people who didn’t go to college because of cost. There will be so much resentment, and those feelings will be valid.

I still support student loan forgiveness. The point that it’s bad debt is an important one, and it would help a lot of people. If I could press a button that would forgive federal loans, I’d do it. But I’d be making this face as I pressed it:

https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/daenerys-targaryen-meme-1556127294.png

My support of federal loan forgiveness is selfless… well, except for the $10k federal loan I brought to the marriage that is down to about $2k. If Joe Biden forgave it, that would be neat.

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I am still paying my student loans so I’m definitely not strongly AGAINST discharging them, for selfish reasons, but it is quite clear to me that the people who won’t benefit from student loan forgiveness will get the message loud and clear that their interests are not just being ignored but being stomped on. And no I’m not talking about people who already paid off their degrees. Those people have the same asset as those who will benefit. I’m talking about people who decided not to go to college because they were afraid of debt, who went into the military to have college paid for, who turned down or didn’t apply to their dream school and went to community college and a state school instead. Those decisions have real impacts on peoples’ lives and earning power and I can see how it would feel like a real kick in the teeth to see the people who got to have the fancy college experience, made the contacts, and have the high income jobs be excited that they can now have the huge asset and none of the debt when they themselves sacrificed that asset because they knew they couldn’t afford it. It’s a demand for selective selflessness to call them assholes for caring and noticing.

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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.

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Only about a third of the country has a four year degree--the majority does not. The problem has always been that the majority is subsidizing the minority when it comes to higher education. The federal guarantee on loans, federal grants (research and otherwise) to college and universities, etc. etc. As I and plenty of other people have pointed out below there is no way that 99% of college students would ever qualify for massive student loans with the federal loan guarantee.

Given that degree earners typically earn more over the course of a lifetime compared to everybody else the optics here are terrible unless spun as "educating the general population", "increasing national competitiveness", or what not. I think it's understandable why that same 2/3 majority, which has already been footing the bill, may be somewhat disgruntled when asked to pick up an even larger share of the tab in the form of college loan forgiveness.

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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....

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Reform the institutions. Put a cap on tuition and fee increases. Fire half of the administrators. On second thought, fire all of the DEI administrators.

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I didn't read all 130 comments. More like 10.

Anyway, at the risk of repeating what everyone else said:

1. Obviously, you can't just forgive student loan debt for people making $100,000 per year or less (or something else means-tested like that) because means-tested programs are, for whatever reason, universally despised. (Though I could imagine a program passing that forgave debt just for the people making $300,000 a year or more. Maybe I'm too cynical?)

2. If you just forgave student loan debt without doing anything else, you'd have a real moral hazard problem, I suspect. The problem, as I see it, is not just the debt, it's also that (a) tons of people are going to college who don't want to learn anything but just want increased job prospects, and, (b) substantially as a result of (a), most students who go to college learn very little. So, unless you just want to keep this whirligig spinning, what might be politically palatable is bundling debt forgiveness with something else -- e.g., no more federally funded student loans.

3. I mean, why have federally funded student loans anyway? The theory, I think, is that you want people in your society to be educated because it makes them more skilled and also passes on positive externalities. But ... (a) it doesn't really make them more skilled, (b) many of them are saddled with debt, (c) many of them drop out before completing the degree anyway, and at least, (d) people lose 4-6 prime income-earning and society-contributing-to years. Moreover, if you didn't have federally funded loans, then you'd have banks funding people who are (in the banks' eyes) worth funding. You'd have many fewer people going to college and many fewer poor humanities majors, both of which are very good indeed (see (a)-(d) in this paragraph).

4. Another reason to support federal loans for student education is that it allows for there to be more institutions of higher education, which, in turn, means that there are more places producing research. But what a lot of people who make this argument forget is: fuck those institutions. I mean, colleges and universities have a positive reputation that they eminently don't deserve. There are at least 127 Ph.D.-in-English-granting institutions in the USA. Imagine the job prospects for someone who gets a Ph.D. from #119! Like, why do programs ##11-127 exist? Simply so that faculty members will have people to grade composition courses for them, and so that they can look more reputable in the eyes of their awful peers. (Full disclosure: I am a professor, and probably awful as well).

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