Student Loan Forgiveness

See: Student Debt.

Should we? Like, there’s a trillion bucks out there in student debt. Why not just “forgive” it? We call a mulligan. A whiff. Whoops. Bobby Joe, don’t worry ‘bout that $173,278 you owe for your English Major from Pepperdine (gorgeous campus private school in Malibu, CA). The best-paying job you can get will pay about $40,000 a year and go up a few grand a year for a while from there. Teaching. Your interest and principal payments together will be $20,000 or so. Unless some rich uncle dies, you’re financially dead meat.

Should society dip into its pockets and pay your loans, Bobby Joe? Somebody has to pay. The money has been spent already. (Domino’s and Annheuser-Busch got like a third of it, right?)

Should we? Can we talk about fairness? What about all those first generation immigrant families whose parents worked 3 jobs cleaning toilets to pay for school so that Emma only needed to borrow $38,782 after going to junior college for her first 2 years, taking a ton of AP courses to waive college credits and doing the online dance, some of it here at Shmoop Central? Do we tell her parents that most of their sacrifice was...a waste. They should have waited for Grandma Government to just come along and bail her out, and everything would have been just fine.

Oh, and what message does that send to future generations who don’t think through the whole notion of student debt? Do we end up with a nation of wait-for-others-to-bail-me-outters?

Political. Hot. Button. Does everyone have the right to a college education? The right? Yes. The duty of society to pay for it? No.

So...that political hot button. Should we press it?