I have two stories to tell, and then a discussion.
Back when I was a teenager, there was a fight (I grew up in a violent family). Little Sis and Bro had a job to do. Little Sis’s portion was the first step. Bro had to finish the job. Apparently, Little Sis did not do her part of the job up to Bro’s standards. I don’t know if he asked Little Sis to redo it, or if he just immediately got mad. I got involved in the fight when Little Sis went tearing past me, her face a mask of terror as Bro chased her down. Little Sis was about 8, and Bro was mid-teens. Huge size difference. I got in the middle and found out the problem. “I’ll fix it!” I yelled, “I’ll do her job! Leave her alone!” I was body-blocking Bro who was still trying to get around me to reach Little Sis (she was under the couch by now). Bro turned down my offer. I asked him, “Do you want the job done or do you just want to hurt her?” In total honesty, he yelled back at me, “I just want to hurt her!”
The second story comes from a Gospel Doctrine lesson I taught as an adult. The discussion was about worthiness and what we had to do to reach the Celestial Kingdom. A woman raised her hand and said something to the effect that she didn’t want anyone who had done less than she had done to get to the Celestial Kingdom because it wouldn’t be fair. Stunned at her uncharitable attitude, I took a couple minutes to gather my thoughts and replied something like, “I hope there are tons of people in the Celestial Kingdom who did less than I did! I don’t want to be the bottom cut-off. I want so many people to be there that no one even questions whether I scraped through as the last one in.”
Alright, let’s pick a topic where we could ease peoples’ suffering and rough times if we wanted to, but not everyone wants to. Student debt forgiveness. Skip all the political comments, okay? This is a discussion about attitudes, not about what a political party did or didn’t do and why. Also, for purposes of this blog post, forgiving student debt has no financial impact on anyone else. FOR PURPOSES OF THIS BLOG POST.
And again, I’ll tell a story. I was in a work setting and student loan forgiveness came up. A man in his 60s, who is making a generous salary (still not in the 1%, but maybe the top 20%) said he disagreed with student loan forgiveness because he had to pay back his student loans. If he had to do it, so should everyone else. He got his degree and a well-paid job. Yes, he had some hard times and it pinched to make the student loan payments. He paid his loans. He never went homeless or hungry while paying his loans.
However, if student loans are forgiven for someone now, it isn’t going to make his life any easier. He’s already paid back his loans; nothing can change his past, and no one is going to reimburse what he already paid.
Do we make life easier for people and forgive student loans?
Why or why not?
- No loan forgiveness. I had to pay back my loans; no one should have it easier than I did.
- No loan forgiveness. It builds character to struggle financially.
- No loan forgiveness. People might get a sense of entitlement.
- Yes to loan forgiveness. There are so many economic challenges now; the world has changed; let’s forgive student loans.
- Yes to loan forgiveness. People will take the money they would have spent on loan repayments and spend it spending, which helps the economy.
- Yes to loan forgiveness. We should help people. Life should be better for those that come after us.
- Yes, but only if they’re in a really sympathetic situation like a single parent working a minimum wage job while caring for a child with special needs.
- Yes and no. Some people should have their loans forgiven and some people shouldn’t.
- Yes and no. Some amount of student loans should be forgiven, but not the entire balance.
The way this ties into Church is the commandments and rules that are just for the sake of having commandments and rules. The Church leaders believe that people will be blessed for obedience, even if the obedience could be waived or modified by the Church. Tithing is the perfect example. The Church could drop tithing to 5%. Or go back to say people should pay tithing on their increase (income minus expenses) rather than their gross income. Yet the struggle to pay tithing is somehow character building.
What I’m getting at is a thought exercise designed to see if the attitude the Church teaches about how you’ll be blessed for suffering and sacrifice carries over into secular areas. Specifically, in ways in which suffering COULD be lessened if we wanted. Everyone has pain and problems. But some pain and problems could be lessened or eliminated.
Clearly, the tendency to refuse to help, or to actively increase someone’s suffering because “they deserve it” (like my Little Sis) doesn’t originate with religion. You can be an atheist or agnostic and still resent it if someone gets help that you didn’t get. Even if helping someone else doesn’t increase your suffering, some people resent when other people get something that they didn’t.
It’s a fairness discussion, but with a twist. Assume your suffering and struggles are in the past. You paid your student loans; you did your chores; you made it to the Celestial Kingdom. Nothing is going to change that. But now … things are going to be easier for the people coming after you.
Wheat & Tares 
I paid my student loans back. But when I went to school, tuition was 140-180 per quarter, so the $6000 I had after a four-year bachelor’s and a master’s degree wasn’t that much, except that my first job was 11,144 per year. It was hard to pay back, but I did it. Today, at the same school, tuition is 20K per semester, so instead of $700 per year, it’s now $40,000 at that’s at a state university.
My daughters made it through their bachelor’s degree with less than $6000 debt, but they did have that amount. They both decided to get masters, which was expensive, 180K and 150K, respectively. They both worked for non-profits, and we promised load forgiveness if they worked 10 years there. They did, and the loans were forgiven. They paid an income adjustment amount for 10 years but still owed the same amount after all that time. I cried when their loans were forgiven, but I got a lot of grief from people I worked with because they paid theirs off, or they didn’t go, or whatever the excuse was. It made me sad.
I won’t make this political except to say that it’s in the political arena that we make our religious values known. Asking questions about loan forgiveness or if we both can succeed in different circumstances is like the prodigal son’s discussion with the righteous son. The righteous son wanted the inheritance given him by political power/laws and precedent, but his religious values conflicted with “right and wrong.” The father’s religious values were in line with his political obligations the righteous son’s, I don’t think, was. Doing one without the other just allows us to justify ourselves.
Student Loans as they currently exist are an evil. The fundamental flaw in Student Loans is the school or university that benefits from them bears no risk risk if the loan is not paid. This creates a dynamic of schools and universities benefiting from increasing the cost of education and forcing students to take out loans – the institution gets paid regardless of the value of the education and the student is left with the burden of repayment even if the education failed to produce sufficient income.
So my public policy answer is that a portion of Student Loans should be forgiven on condition that the law change to make schools and universities accountable for accepting borrowed money and failing to provide commensurate value to students. I do not support complete forgiveness of Student Loans except where the individual demonstrates via due process that he or she is wholly incapable of satisfying the debt obligation.
In a more perfect world there would be a legal limit on the recourse / personal debt a personal can assume with defined measures for the person be released from that debt. It is rather insane that a 20 year old can take on tens of thousands of dollars of personal debt in order to secure a degree that by itself provides no sure path to high income. Large personal debt to be a lawyer or doctor or engineer can make sense. But personal debt to get a degree in, let’s say History or Art, only makes sense if that debt is small.
But big mistakes in US Education policy have been made. Without the core problem being fixed I am not a fan of general forgiveness of Student Loans. I suppose that is me being cruel to the individual. However, without the core problem being fixed, the forgiveness of loans amounts to outright stealing, where the school or university is taking massive amounts of money and no one is actually ever paying for that money! I don’t see how a country can survive having systems of theft operating at such a massive scale.
And without the core problem being addressed, I don’t see any motivation by universities to address the matter of the economic value of the curriculum they offer. Do we simply pretend year after year that Tuition and Student Loans are just made up numbers that simply define the money the university collects from taxpayers? For without changing the law, we end up having to forgive Student Loans year after year after year. In which case, we are not talking about loan forgiveness but about a system of legalized plunder.
Do we want young people with college degrees to be full participants in society and the economy?
Do we want them to buy homes and establish roots in a community?
Do we want them to have children that become the foundations of vibrant new generations?
Do we want them to buy cars, furniture, good food, vacations, and electronic devices, thereby stimulating the economy?
Do we want them to think their country views them as valued citizens instead of just a sales opportunity?
Do we want them to have faith in the nation’s economic system? (Because they’re losing it fast and looking at alternatives many of you would call socialist or communist. They’ve been hung out to dry. What did you expect them to do? Grab those bootstraps?)
I am a believer that suffering and trials build character, but I’m more mechanistic about it. Challenges teach you how to do things and build self confidence, but getting roped into paying off a huge loan that was handed out with no realistic effort on anyone’s part to connect cost with the value of the degree or the state of the economy is ludicrous. The banks hand out the loans because the federal government acts as a guarantor and the graduates are ultimately left holding the bag in a way that ensures failure to launch after they graduate.
BTW, if you’re mad because you paid off your $4000 in student loans and more recent graduates might have help paying off their $90,000 in loans for a degree in communications, you should probably take a closer look at the system that permits this charade instead of your personal grievances. There is a broader concern in play.
As for whether or not any of this can be related to paying tithing, I vote not, except that the church uses moral suasion to coerce tithing payment and many of the graduates’ fellow citizens will also tell them that they are immoral and unethical to accept help with their loans. Neither is true, in my estimation, but in the church’s case the entire game is manipulation and no measurable benefits accrue (I get that many individuals think they have benefited from paying tithing, but you’ll never convince me that meaningful research would support that belief) in this life. At least loans pay for a degree that is marketable to a greater or lesser extent and can be used to create actual, tangible value.
“I’m not interested in competing with anyone. I hope we all make it.”
That’s a sentiment I can fully endorse, in how both the Church, society and the U.S. Government operates. Currently no one is even close to that ideal.
There seems to be something built in to many (most?) people, myself included, that we don’t like to see other people get a benefit that we didn’t get. My personal example was my immediate reaction to letting missionaries call home pretty much whenever they want. I didn’t get to, so why should they? That’s perhaps an even better example than student loan forgiveness, because it really has almost no cost to anyone. Intellectually, I recognize that my emotional reaction was stupid, but it’s still my emotional reaction. I’ll go ahead and label this emotional reaction the “natural man”.
As for student loan forgiveness, I’m in favor of some combination of options 7, 8 and 9. Most people should get some forgiveness. Should be dependent on income. Anyone who has spent 20 years making their minimum payments should have it forgiven, because any system that gives minimum payments that only lead to more minimum payments is BS.
A Disciple has some good points about how messed up the system is, and that’s got to be addressed. The bank won’t give me an $80k loan to buy a 2013 Honda Civic, because they recognize that is a terrible deal. But, if I want $80k of student debt to get a degree in social work, they’re ok with that. Any loan process where both parties aren’t taking on risk is a bad system.
Such an important conversation.
For me the answer is always 6. If it’s in my power to make it easier and better, then I want to do it. Let the rest of life “build character” or whatever. I’ve 0 interest in doing that work.
I always get a chuckle out of the “but that’s not fair” argument. Isn’t the whole point of Christianity, especially the Mormon take, that “fair” ends up being a really raw deal for everybody who isn’t, you know, God?
And even if that’s not your paradigm anymore, complaining that somebody else got something you also got but for less strikes me as sad. What in your life has been so hard on you that you’re begrudging somebody else their good fortune? Bound to be a story there.
Sorry. Back because I’ve been thinking a lot about DaveW’s example. I think what bothers us so much in those situations is not that somebody else got something we didn’t, but that it forces us to confront the injustice of our own suffering. If calling home once a week is nbd, then why did DaveW have to forego it? It’s not that somebody else is getting something he didn’t; it’s that he never should have had to suffer in the first place. The fact that our church never apologizes and seldom even provides reasons for what they do doesn’t help.
I think the same was probably true for that poor woman in your Gospel Doctrine class, Janey. She probably found parts of being a Latter-day Saint incredibly hard, and if somebody else got the same reward she did, without having to suffer in the ways she was suffering… what does that say about her suffering? Was it for nothing?
Humans are hypocritical. We want life to be better, easier for our own offspring. For others? We preach about it, we nod our heads in agreement, we put money in envelopes and machines and canned food by our doors because that’s simple. But we generally overwork and underpay people, refuse to have our taxes raised to adequately support the disabled and mentally ill, give big loans to corporations and then bail them out again because “they’re too big to fail” (meaning too important to the shareholders, meaning me.) The schools have to run food pantries now. So many Scrooges.
I know I’m kind of changing the subject here but hear me out:
Now that I’m out of the Church I kind of look down on the TBMs today who have it so much easier than we did. 2 hour church vs. 3; monthly home teaching vs. periodic “ministry”; calling home only twice a year during mission vs. weekly face time calls; rigid garment wearing vs. “I’ll wear them if I feel like it”; Boy Scouts vs. ?. There are many other examples.
I guess my point is that I feel like when we did the Mormon thing we did it pretty hard core compared to what I see with a lot of “active” LDS today. Just sayin.
Make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy and the whole system would reform itself in a matter of days. Under the current code (last time I checked), student loans are technically dischargeable, but only in cases of “undue hardship” — and bankruptcy judges set a very high standard for what might qualify as undue hardship. A discharge is almost unobtainable, whatever the hardship. A simple amendment passed by Congress and signed by the President making student loans as dischargeable as any other personal debt (credit cards, personal loans from the bank, etc.) would allow those with means to pay back their loans and those who cannot and who are forced into bankruptcy to obtain a discharge and move on with life, getting a fresh start (from close to financial zero, of course — it’s not like winning the lottery).
Of course, a lot of lenders would then decline to make a lot of student loans. And without all that loan money pumped into the system, colleges and universities would have to reduce their tuition and other costs or risk significant declines in enrollment. Which would all be good outcomes, because the whole higher education system is bloated and overpriced.
We all make choices, and no two people make exactly the same choices. I had student loans and I paid them back (undergraduate and graduate, both at private universities), and I paid back my wife’s also after we were married. But I knew before college that I wouldn’t be able to pay myself, and my family was in no position to help. So I went into the military and got educational benefits that way. They are much more generous than they were then, and this option is open to men and women. So that reduced my loans. I took a full load every semester, 18 hours, instead of taking what some people called a full load at 12 hours, and I went in the summer, too, instead of taking off and chilling. We both got Pell grants. My wife worked. Here’s what we didn’t do: spend a lot of money. Starbucks, Netflix, and Doordash didn’t exist back then, but there were still plenty of ways to spend money, which we avoided. We didn’t have cell phones and we rarely made a long distance phone call. We had roommates. We shopped at thrift stores for clothes. We took no vacations. Our marriage cost us nothing (temple, reception in church gym thrown by friends). I do not deny that tuition has gone up, but my perception is that we lived more poorly than most students seem to live these days. For those who don’t know, many public employers today, including school districts and many federal agencies, have loan forgiveness programs that are tied to employment for some period of time. There are options. Reducing student loans by the amount actually spent on education, maybe that is something we can discuss. I am not keen on paying back for lifestyle choices.
I would propose something different instead of paying back loans that adults took in full knowledge of what they were doing. I would propose making state universities free for in-state residents. That would give private schools some competition and might bring prices down. I don’t know how this would be paid for. Of course, one would still have to qualify to get admitted, so everyone couldn’t go to school for free. And the government would have to figure out how to pay for it. I think that state governments might be in a better position than the federal government. I think that Tennessee has started paying community college tuition, but I’ve not heard how that is working out.
I agree with the earlier sentiments about student loans, that there are massive systemic problems at the heart of the matter that perpetuate economic disparities and educational access injustice, and it’s a problem that we (as Americans) have created for ourselves. The incoming administration intends to try to solve the problem by burning down the Dept. of Education entirely, which is equally as foolish, with a raft of unforseen consequences that may come with it. Loan forgiveness, in its various forms, is a much more practical and feasible solution, and despite the concerns from some quarters, is probably the most morally sound approach.
Setting that issue aside, I am in favor of certain kinds of targeted loan forgiveness programs, even though I went into debt to pay for school (as did my wife) and we worked hard in the childless early years of our marriage to pay that debt off. Granted, we both went to public universities in our respective home states and had manageable levels of debt, while some of my contemporaries at fancy private schools were approaching six-figure debt loads before graduating with degrees that had no more earning power than mine, but that’s another subject. Anyway, my brother-in-law, who graduated about 5 years later at the height of the Great Recession, is still mired in student loan debt from his private liberal arts school BA, despite having been a student-athlete on partial scholarship (this was a Div II school, which doesn’t allow full athletic scholarships). He did everything he thought he was expected to do–went to a good school, worked hard and got very good grades, etc.–then graduated into the worst economic conditions in a generation. He never really found his professional footing, and drifted from one low-paying job to the next. Today, he works his butt off to barely make ends meet. He’s pretty much given up on the possibility of home ownership, being so far out of reach for him. Whenever the Biden administration dangled a batch of student loan forgiveness programs that he was eligible for, it would get challenged in court and struck down, which frustrates my brother-in-law to no end. So I support income-based loan forgiveness programs for people like him. Even though I paid my own loans, those programs were never for me, but for the people a few rungs down the socioeconomic ladder from me like my brother-in-law, who could really use the relief.
I also strongly support the public service loan forgiveness programs (which the first Trump administration made a mess of, and had no inclination to fix, while the Biden administration worked feverishly to get them working again as intended) which attach reasonable, personalized conditions to loan forgiveness, rather than a blanket act of forgiveness for all, and further benefits society by encouraging the pursuit of public service careers.
Opposition to student loan forgiveness is another example of the shameful American tradition of pulling up the ladder behind you. Examples of this phenomenon include broadly disparaging immigration and immigrants (or using them as political pawns), conveniently forgetting that we ourselves are only a few generations (or less) removed from ancestors who were born somewhere else. There’s the clueless boomer parents who covered their obscenely low college tuition in the 60s by working a minimum wage job during summer breaks, while calling me lazy for not following that pattern (instead I took summer classes or did demanding internships). My boomer mom is also viruently anti-feminist, owing largely to the fact that her own personal and professional ambitions were blocked by 1960s gender norms, and she is bitter about younger generations of women getting to have what she could not. Even ex-Mormons and progressive Mormons fall victim to this attitude; when the twenty-something active Mormons today take relaxed attitudes toward garment wearing or Word of Wisdom adherence, we tend to look at them resentfully, since many of us didn’t feel sufficiently empowered to take nuanced views of religious observance when we were at that stage in life.
And to the broader titular question, I do think we have an inherent obligation to make conditions better for future generations, whether familial, environmental, political, sociopolitical, geopolitical, economic, or even religious. Being a good ancestor is more important than being a good descendant.
I agree with the earlier sentiments about student loans, that there are massive systemic problems at the heart of the matter that perpetuate economic disparities and educational access injustice, and it’s a problem that we (as Americans) have created for ourselves. The incoming administration intends to try to solve the problem by burning down the Dept. of Education entirely, which is equally as foolish, with a raft of unforseen consequences that may come with it. Loan forgiveness, in its various forms, is a much more practical and feasible solution, and despite the concerns from some quarters, is probably the most morally sound approach.
Setting that issue aside, I am in favor of certain kinds of targeted loan forgiveness programs, even though I went into debt to pay for school (as did my wife) and we worked hard in the childless early years of our marriage to pay that debt off. Granted, we both went to public universities in our respective home states and had manageable levels of debt, while some of my contemporaries at fancy private schools were approaching six-figure debt loads before graduating with degrees that had no more earning power than mine, but that’s another subject. Anyway, my brother-in-law, who graduated about 5 years later at the height of the Great Recession, is still mired in student loan debt from his private liberal arts school BA, despite having been a student-athlete on partial scholarship (this was a Div II school, which doesn’t allow full athletic scholarships). He did everything he thought he was expected to do–went to a good school, worked hard and got very good grades, etc.–then graduated into the worst economic conditions in a generation. He never really found his professional footing, and drifted from one low-paying job to the next. Today, he works his butt off to barely make ends meet. He’s pretty much given up on the possibility of home ownership, being so far out of reach for him. Whenever the Biden administration dangled a batch of student loan forgiveness programs that he was eligible for, it would get challenged in court and struck down, which frustrates my brother-in-law to no end. So I support income-based loan forgiveness programs for people like him. Even though I paid my own loans, those programs were never for me, but for the people a few rungs down the socioeconomic ladder from me like my brother-in-law, who could really use the relief.
I also strongly support the public service loan forgiveness programs (which the first Trump administration made a mess of, and had no inclination to fix, while the Biden administration worked feverishly to get them working again as intended) which attach reasonable, personalized conditions to loan forgiveness, rather than a blanket act of forgiveness for all, and further benefits society by encouraging the pursuit of public service careers.
Opposition to student loan forgiveness is another example of the shameful American tradition of pulling up the ladder behind you. Examples of this phenomenon include broadly disparaging immigration and immigrants (or using them as political pawns), conveniently forgetting that we ourselves are only a few generations (or less) removed from ancestors who were born somewhere else. There’s the clueless boomer parents who covered their obscenely low college tuition in the 60s by working a minimum wage job during summer breaks, while calling me lazy for not following that pattern (instead I took summer classes or did demanding internships). My boomer mom is also viruently anti-feminist, owing largely to the fact that her own personal and professional ambitions were blocked by 1960s gender norms, and she is bitter about younger generations of women getting to have what she could not. Even ex-Mormons and progressive Mormons fall victim to this attitude; when the twenty-something active Mormons today take relaxed attitudes toward garment wearing or Word of Wisdom adherence, we tend to look at them resentfully, since many of us didn’t feel sufficiently empowered to take nuanced views of religious observance when we were at that stage in life.
And to the broader titular question, I do think we have an inherent obligation to make conditions better for future generations, whether familial, environmental, political, sociopolitical, geopolitical, economic, or even religious. Being a good ancestor is more important than being a good descendant.
Just because I worked hard , paid off my student loans, and did without some hallmarks of middle class life despite my degrees, because I had these loans, doesn’t make me in any way superior to students today. I want them to do better than me. I don’t want them to be weighed down with debt.
Lots of good, thoughtful comments about student loans on this thread. There are big picture issues that need to be addressed, both in how loans have contributed to cost increases at schools, and how the economy has changed.
I paid a good portion of my school expenses from minimum wage jobs and restricting my spending (like Georgis describes), but tuition has gone up so much, and minimum wage hasn’t, that no one today could pay more than a pittance towards tuition from a minimum wage job. And economizing just doesn’t bring much bang for the buck anymore. Netflix is $15/month and if your student loans are $60,000, foregoing Netflix is like using an eye dropper to put out a forest fire.
Margie put words to an idea I was trying to get at: “I think what bothers us so much in those situations is not that somebody else got something we didn’t, but that it forces us to confront the injustice of our own suffering.”
That’s IT! That’s it exactly! Why did I have to go through that difficult experience? We like to think our struggles are somehow worth it, and having someone else sidestep the struggle entirely makes us question if we really needed that struggle in our lives.
And then the deep introspective question: how do we respond to injustice? Pass it on to the next person in an effort to make things ‘fair’ to us? Or work to prevent the injustice from harming anyone in the future?
This post isn’t really about student loans, and I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind about anything. It’s for introspection. How do I feel about my struggles and what would I do if I had a chance to prevent someone else from struggling the same way?
Jack Hughes – I want to crosstitch this and hang it on my wall: “Being a good ancestor is more important than being a good descendant.”
I think we should forgive student loans in some situations, like doctors working on tribal lands or people serving in the military. Student loans provide information. If the cost of all education is $0, which is what forgiving all student debt means, then it’s more difficult for students to decipher which fields of study are more valuable. Everybody knows becoming doctors, pilots, Wharton MBAs cost truckloads of money. The entry cost for those fields causes people to self select if they really want the pain of paying back $250k. I want a doctor who really wanted to be one. And I don’t want doctors to quit at 45 because it’s hard and studying art history for free sounds funner.
This is an economics argument – but not primarily financial – that it messes with the value of degrees and that some barriers to entry and exit are good. It also boils down to the argument that you have to have skin in the game. I took part in a very interesting experiment at BYU. A retiring engineering professor gave everyone A’s at the beginning of the semester; his theory was that people would study harder because of less stress. He was so wrong. Virtually everyone didn’t attend class after two weeks once they got busy. Skin in the game provides real incentives.
Another real life scenario is the question if we should give new parents 4 months of paid leave. When my wife had our children I took 5 days off work and it counted out of my allocation for the year. Should current new parents have the chance to spend 4 months with their newborn even though I didn’t? Yes they should. It’s the right thing to do even though I didn’t get that chance.
All of this points to the parable of The Prodigal Son, wherein the point of the parable is not whether one was obedient and followed the rules perfectly or strayed and was a sinner and returned. No, the point of the parable was that the obedient brother missed the mark because he could not be happy that the wayward brother returned to the fold.
This is where the Sunday School woman missed the mark. She could not find joy in how many others found their way, regardless of how their lives, suffering, or ease compared to hers. She was only focused on herself.
And so, of course we should all be joyful that others can become more educated and hopefully be a benefit to society. We should be joyful that others succeed. We should be engaged in making sure as many people as possible succeed in life.
Life is so complex that it’s hard to see it as a zero sum game unless you make it so.
I reject the idea that the poor are entitled or that the meager ways through which the government helps them makes them entitled. If you want to see entitlement, look no further than the wealthy classes.
Student loan forgiveness is overwhelmingly going towards helping those who attended some community college but never finished their degree, make low wages, and are burdened just by a few thousand in debt. Over the last century the government has been indispensable in alleviating poverty and building a middle class. We can argue about how exactly the government should or shouldn’t help the poor, but as to whether they should help the poor at all is a non-issue. Poverty would still be quite high today without government interventions.
As a practical person, I feel like forgiving student loans as a one time thing misses the mark. There are true problems with the educational system and the costs associated with it. Forgiving the loans on a one time basis doesn’t resolve those problems for the next group of students coming along.
In terms of fairness, the costs of education today are much higher than the costs of education in the past. So my husband paying off his loans years ago doesn’t compare to the loans today.
However, without these practicalities to deal with, I forgive them. To me this course of action is taught by Christ in the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. He demonstrates the principal that each worker has individual needs that the others do not necessarily experience. He addresses the needs presented at the moment (each worker needs money to live and needs to be paid regardless of the work they were able to do), rather than evaluating fairness.
I agree that incentives matter as well. However there are so many individual situations that incentives do not correct. Incentives are valuable in some situations. Not so much in others. To me it’s not fairness that matters, but what works practically in each situation.
I never finished college, in large part because of the terrifying amount of debt I would have had to take on to do so. I watched other friends at the time take on large amounts of debt to get degrees, sometimes in fields that didn’t seem like a very good investment. I thought I was doing the prudent thing, and have been glad that I don’t have student debt hanging over my head, even though I would certainly be in a higher paying field and position if I had finished. I am glad that my friends and family and others are getting some relief, but if I had known that relief was coming, I probably would have finished that degree.
To the extent that we have limited funds for education, I would like to see those funds diverted to k-12. It’s shameful that we graduate kids from high school without the skills to get anything but a minimum wage job. I do also think we should heavily subsidize higher education, even to the point that it’s free. A highly educated populace would be so, so good for our country, in every aspect. The difficulty of the degree and expected reward is plenty of skin in the game, we don’t need kids taking out a mortgage worth of debt to get there. It’s *hard* to become a doctor, no-one is just doing it for laughs, with or without the crippling debt. Whether or not debt forgiveness is the way to get there – well, I am sympathetic to the arguments here that it’s a one-time solution to an ongoing problem, and should be coupled with reform. But, like the story with the starfish, even if we can’t help everyone, we can help these ones.
I think Dave B’s solution is an interesting one, and I believe it’s the same solution used for medical debt. I was talking with someone recently about their retirement plans. We reminded them “Be sure you have money set aside to replace your car.” and “Remember you might incur medical debt.” The reply, which had me musing: “Oh, I don’t pay medical bills. I just throw them out. I finally just declared bankruptcy for them because there was literally no possible way to pay them.” Medical debt is another one where we need huge system reforms, and I’m not buying the line from some journalists that “Everyone hates the system, but everyone likes their own coverage / provider.” Yes, my coverage and provider are fine by US standards, but to be clear that’s a very low bar. Most Americans probably just don’t have a lot of non-US experience with healthcare.
Same with college. The colleges are charging exorbitant rates. College tuitions have risen to astronomical levels, to the point that it’s not a good investment. As pointed out above, you are going to pay a whole lot to become a social worker or school teacher. Is it worth it, or do we as a society only value doctors and lawyers? (And medical practices are *not* exempt from the critiques levied at our healthcare system. There’s a reason insurers are refusing to pay the full “cost” of anesthesia for procedures suddenly, and that reason is that some doctors have increased their costs well beyond what’s reasonable for these things–do we think doctors should get carte blanche to set the rates? Should the insurers? Take your pick, but either way, it’s patients who lose.)
Back to university education, there are a few things I haven’t yet seen mentioned that I’ll throw in:
1) because of the cultural idea that a college education means higher earning power for life (not always true), the percent of people who seek a college education has risen dramatically over my lifetime, so it would seem to follow that its value to society would decrease unless entire markets are changing, which maybe they are. Although, and this is a lead in to the next point, things like programming and coding (expanding industries) no longer require 4 years of college, but instead are often done in an intensive “bootcamp” style education over an 8 week period–these are high paying jobs! (And I did ask my friend who is a professor teaching this at a very prestigious university, and she said “Yep, the bootcamp is a better investment.”
2) how necessary is a college education or the amount of education we require in the US for certain careers. In other countries like the UK, they are gobsmacked at the notion of having two years of putzing around (what we can “general education” and “electives.”) We recently did a bog tour in Estonia with 3 university students in the UK. They started their courses–all in STEM–at age 17, and will graduate with lucrative jobs lined up. US education cannot say that at all. Which brings us to another point…
3) there are quite a few European countries offering free or very low tuition, and Americans are eligible: Iceland (where I first heard about this–$600 annual registration fee only), Czech Republic (very highly renown education, free in Czech or $1800 per semester in English after a $20 registration fee, living costs around $500/mon), Germany (you do pay an admin fee of $300), Finland (living costs roughly $7500/yr), Norway (living costs will run about $1700/month), Sweden (free PhD tuition, and courses are in English–application fee of $110 plus $1000/mon living expenses), France ($208 per year), Slovenia (gorgeous country, 150 English language programs, and a dorm room is only $150/mon) and many many more. The US’s anti-government/libertarian ideology make us less competitive, not more. We’ve slid into a kleptocracy, which was a short slide from capitalism.
Personally, I’m not opposed to forgiving student debt at all. I am pretty opposed to the things I’ve mentioned here: the insanely rising costs, the onerous requirements for specific careers, the quality of the education, and the return on investment in general. The fact that we’ve bought into the idea that everyone should get a college education to get ahead is very similar to when educators noted in the 1970s that kids whose parents read to them did better in school. It was a correlative connection, not causative. As always, the wealthy & privileged get ahead, and yes, they can afford college (Ivy Leagues are all about networking, after all), and they have the leisure time to read to their young children.
Firstly, cancel student debt. Secondly, we need to understand why education costs are outpacing inflation when the buildings are already there and the professors wages are stagnant and cut the crap. Third, we need financial literacy so that these 18 year olds (or as georgis calls them, adults, agree to disagree) can quickly see which programs don’t make sense. And fourth, we need to call out parents who use their kids university acceptance in pissing matches. We all want a deal on Amazon Prime Day but are willing to pay multiples for USC and the Ivy Leagues so our kids can land the same jobs the state schools can access. It’s disgusting.
My firm is quite progressive and started a six week paid paternity leave around the time my first child was born in 2007. The amount of hate I got from management was astounding. How dare I use a benefit they didn’t get? Our leave is now six months and though I’m done co-raising babies I couldn’t be happier. I’ve decided truly that comparison is the thief of joy and misery does indeed love company.
Lots of church examples as pointed out by Josh h and Davew. Since a rising tide helps all ships I think we all benefit somehow. For example I only got two calls home on my mission but I’ll get more touch points with friends and family today.
Hawwkgirl,
Our medical situation involves much more than insurance and providers. Enormous conglomerates have bought up all parties involved and require them to only use the services they allow regardless of conflicts of interest. This has really increased the price of health insurance and it has put the profit of those conglomerates into the top 20 in the US. Hawley and Warren are putting together a bill to peel pharmacies off of this monopoly. It’s a good beginning. If you are interested in this topic enjoy the article below.
https://open.substack.com/pub/mattstoller/p/its-time-to-break-up-big-medicine?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=bztsj
Correction: this has increased the cost of medical care of all sorts.
Lots and lots of people suffer under credit card debt. What are the thoughts of the W&T audience on the US Treasury paying off all credit card debt? Seems to me like that would reach a lot more people than current and former college students. I think (could be wrong) that the interest rates on credit card debt are more punishing for the poor than student loan rates. If we want to help single mothers, the working poor, and those who see debt as an impediment to their happiness, then cancelling credit card debt might do more good than cancelling student loans. I think that American consumers owe somewhere around $1.1T in credit card debt. I think the US Government’s debt is around $36T, so one more trillion shouldn’t be a problem.
@georgia some key differences between credit card debt and student debt:
I wouldn’t be opposed to some form of debt holiday. I mean, that’s biblical! I think they are different though.
Is student debt well spent? Is it spending well to get over $100K debt for a degree that usually has a poor salary history? Is it spending well to be doing door dash instead of eating in the chow hall that has been paid for with student loan money? (Asking for a relation attending a private university who unashamedly admits to doing this.) I think that a lot of credit card debt is well spent, when it goes to doctor’s appointments, medicine, food, the electric bill…
I don’t know that a statement that student load debt is categorically “good” debt that should be erased because it was well spent and credit card debt is categorically “bad” debt incurred by people living foolishly beyond their means can stand up to scrutiny. If we want to do good to those on the bottom, I think that credit card debt is far more onerous than student loan debt is. Studies show that people with college degrees earn significantly more than those without, and many of the poor never get close to attending college and can never incur student loan debt. A lot of student loan debt is held by people who have the means of paying it off over time, even if it means doing without a lot of the niceties in the short term. You are right that credit card debt can be discharged in bankruptcy, but it isn’t the very poor who benefit from bankruptcy. They can’t pay the attorneys, or the attorneys won’t take them as clients. It is the middle class who benefits from bankruptcy.
This is a tough issue, and easy blanket statements usually don’t stand up to scrutiny. Medicine and education are two areas that are in great need of intervention, and yet our education and medicine are generally viewed as the best in the world. So how to we improve without destroying? That’s tough. I think that making tuition at state universities free (meaning taxpayer funded) for undergraduates would force private universities to bring costs down by giving them serious competition, and some other ideas mentioned here have merit.
if something is free, it typically has no value. Anything worthwhile requires work and sacrifice. Elimination of student debt devalues the degree and makes it meaningless. Instead, create a suitable student loan program and repayment plan. A couple of thoughts: if the university wants to accept student loan money, they must freeze the cost of tuition for 4 years for that student, assuming he is continuously enrolled and attending. For the student, student debt is a repayment plan for books and tuition. Living expenses are in the student. The student fronts the first semester from money he has saved, and is reimbursed if the classes are passed. No passing grade, no reimbursement. For the repayment, upon graduation the student loan debt is turned into a 30 year fully amortizing mortgage at the same interest rate as the prevailing 30 year Treasury bond. That will cut the average student loan payment in half, compared to today’s program.
US education and healthcare are NOT regarded as the best in the world by any measure. Unless there’s delusional metric that is hiding somewhere.
i see a problem with both Dave B’s and Hawkgrrls comment about discharging student debt in a bankruptcy. There is very little private money and very few private lenders in the student loan arena. At least 90% of student loan money is federal tax money, thanks to Obama nationalizing the student loan program back in 2012. Coincidentally, that’s when the amount of student loan money and cost of tuition both climbed like a rocket. Student debt forgiveness literally comes out of the tax money we collectively pay, which is why I believe the better solution involves capping what universities can charge, managing what students can expect and reforming the payment at the end.
In 2024, USA had best educational system, followed by UK, Germany, Canada, France. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/best-countries-for-education
I think this counts as a measure.
In 2024, in ranking world’s hospitals, USA had 8 of the top 20, including 1, 2, 4, and 5. Other countries with the top 20 included Switzerland with 3, Germany and France with 2, and five other countries with 1. https://www.newsweek.com/rankings/worlds-best-hospitals-2024
I have not assessed the methodologies used in the ratings.
Colleges and universities are complicit in this problem. They are incentivized to encourage students to enroll in programs that will never generate compensation to repay loans. They build buildings ther don’t need and hire unnecessary staff. There is no incentive to operate efficiently.
I have a niece that insisted on going to Yale !aw School because UCLA was not prestigious enough. She earns a very good salary but has “unnecessary “ debt. Should plumbers and electricians pay her debt?
No student loan forgiveness without more accountability and efficiency by higher education institutions. Any repayment must be means tested.
The United States has worse healthcare outcomes compared to other wealthy countries
• United States
Life Expectancy
Infant Mortality
Unmanaged Asthma
Unmanaged Diabetes
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Childbirth
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Heart
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ignore above comment input incomplete
What if our country was more based on “WE” than “I?”
We’d have Universal Health care for all and our country would be healthier.
We’d have a more educated and productive society without such a huge debt. No one would have a free education because instead of “ME” paying it, “WE” all would pay for it. Education is never free. Even with Student Loan forgiveness, someone still pays. Our country would be better if “WE” paid.
We are now competing in a world where advanced countries accomplish national goals with taxes and “WE.” Makes it hard for us individualists to complete when WE have to pay for everything ourselves by cutting taxes. Still, having thousands of dollars in the car or other things we buy go towards individual health care that companies have to pay for. Or burdening our children with debt for education so they can get a job but not be able to afford what it is to make a good life.
We say it but we don’t live it, the sum of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. We could do much greater things if we looked at ourselves as WE instead of I.
lws329: Thanks so much for linking that substack article. Really fantastic information. The problems run deep. Someone (I can’t remember who) said “If corporations are people, those people are psychopaths.” They were really just referring to the fact that corporations are required to maximize profits, because if they don’t their shareholders will demand the board gets a new CEO, etc. etc. Acquiring additional business lines (like pharmaceuticals) that have clear conflicts of interest should be regulated, and or outlawed as a monopolistic practice.
The question of whether we should try to make life harder or easier brings to mind a kind of aphorism/story that I heard a number of times as a kid in the 1980s. It was the idea that hatching is a difficult process for a baby bird, but that if we intervene to make it easier, we inadvertently weaken the bird and it dies. The message, which I never recall questioning as a kid, was that it’s bad to try to make things easy for people, because you’ll make them weak. Hard is good, as Seventy Stanley G. Ellis reminded us a few years ago in Conference.
I’ve also run into this type of thinking among conservatives who don’t want to spend too much helping poor people, who they see as undeserving and lazy. I remember a relative explaining to me how awful is was to directly give poor people money because you were depriving them of the opportunity to lift themselves through their own experience.
Like others on this thread, I’ve seen greater benefits come to people who followed me (missionaries who can regularly call home, students whose debt might be [partially] forgiven, and families that get more paternity or maternity leave). I’m a selfish person, and I definitely always feel irritation that I never got those benefits. But I’m still in favor of them. Life is hard enough without us artificially creating difficult experiences for people.
(Here’s a link on the bird aphorism, which the general Sunday School president recently repeated as his personal experience [scroll down past the picture of a woman reading a magazine]: https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/sunday-school-general-presidency-shares-whys-new-come-follow-me-manual .)
Janey asked for a non political response, que thirty eight political responses, sigh…If you want to know what Jesus apparently thought on the subject read Matthew 20: 1-16
I don’t believe a hard childhood makes strong people. It’s a happy balanced childhood with kind parental care that brings children to grow up to be strong adults that are capable of loving supportive relationships with other people. Well fed children grow up to be bigger stronger adults.
I have read that soldiers that land behind enemy lines and are prisoners of war do better if they have happy memories to return to in their minds. They can picture a happier future than those who have only unhappy memories in their past. The difficulties of the past may strengthen us for the future, but often they do not.
Robert, thanks for citing Matthew 20:1–16, but I respectfully think that these verses don’t fit the scenario very well. These verses contain the parable of the laborers in the vineyard, with some hired early in the day, some later, and some near the very end of the day, and they were all paid the same wage. I agree with these verses that those who accept the gospel late in life can receive salvation as fully as those who are baptized at age eight. What I don’t see is how this parable fits the scenario before us in this post. In the parable, the master did not take wages from those hired early to pay those hired later. The master was wholly fair to those hired early, and he in no way infringed on them. The debt in the student loan situation is transferred to the taxpayer, so there is infringement. It is not the master paying out of his own resources.
I think that Mark 14:3–9 fits our scenario better. Here the apostles grumbled and mumbled when a woman chose how she wanted to use something that was very expensive, but which she owned herself. They complained that it was wasted, and it could have been sold for a year’s wages and given to the poor. Jesus told them to be quiet, or maybe even to shut up (“Let her alone; why trouble ye her?”). He approved the woman being able to do what she wanted to do with what belonged to her. He then told the apostles that what she did with her property was not their business, but that they could give of their own money to the poor anytime they wanted to (“For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good”). He then told us that we need to tell this story often (“Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world, this also that she hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her”). We don’t need to be telling other people what they ought to do with their own money, but we can individually choose to do good with our own money whenever we want to. So much of the gospel, at least as Jesus taught it in the four gospels, is pointed not at society at large, but to each person as an individual in his or her personal choices. I shouldn’t try to put someone’s burden on another person, but I can help shoulder it myself.
That’s my problem with shifting the student loan burden to the taxpayer: we’re trying to do good with someone else’s money. If the people through their representatives choose to pass a law accepting the student loan debt as the public’s debt, then great. I am not keen on a president opening the doors to the treasury by executive fiat (“No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law,” US Constitution, Article I, Section 9). I would welcome a vote in Congress on legislation to wipe out student loan debt, especially since I think the result would be more comprehensive education reform as discussed above, and that would be a good thing.
I do not believe in student loan forgiveness for multiple reasons. However, I have a caveat: I do think after a period (say 20 years) if the principal has been paid off, then the remaining balance could be discharged in a form of bankruptcy. My preferred structure for student loan reform is imposing penalties on higher education institutions relative to the number of students they have who are unable to service and fully pay their student loan back. I would cap/restrict the federal loans future students attending these institutions can take on as a way of ensuring accountability by the institution. After all, it takes two to tango; higher education institutions are part of the problem.
I would also cap total student loans at some multiple of expected, market-based starting salary based on degree. Also, since I’m in the property management area and work with builders and investors, we need to discuss luxury student dormitories replete with high-end amenities, climbing walls, fitness centers, rooftop lounges, firepits, clubhouses, etc. I had this discussion with a nephew just this last weekend who is insistent on going to a pricey in-state university and living on-campus to have the “college experience.” But he could easily just live at home and attend the same university or even do 2 years of community college and then transfer to complete his degree (which I have encouraged him to do). Student loan forgiveness disincentivizes these types of economic decisions.
The main reason I am against student loan forgiveness is that a student loan is a contractual obligation and one has a personal responsibility to fulfill the obligations of the contract. And I did not co-sign on the loan, nor did any other taxpayer. As humans, we are primates and have an innate sense of fairness. The monkey, grape, and cucumber experiment was an experiment conducted by Frans de Waal and his team. It a famous study in animal behavior that explores fairness and inequity aversion among non-human primates. The experiment went as follows:
The study demonstrated that capuchin monkeys have a sense of fairness and are sensitive to unequal treatment. It suggests that the concept of fairness is not unique to humans but may have evolutionary roots. Even though one monkey got a cucumber (good), the perception of seeing an adjacent monkey get a much better reward (grapes) for the same task was highly distressing and lead to anger. In my view, this unequal treatment will lead to a break down in social cohesion in the polity. As such, the only way to politically pair student loan forgiveness would be to offer some form of equal tax credit/forgiveness for all non-college attenders who didn’t incur student loan debt.
Brad D made the comment above that suggested that student loan forgiveness went mostly “towards helping those who attended some community college but never finished their degree, make low wages, and are burdened just by a few thousand in debt.” However, multiple studies have showed that this just isn’t factually accurate. A $10k blanket student debt relief helps high-income borrowers more than low-income ones. It is a regressive policy.
<i>”Janey asked for a non political response, que thirty eight political responses, sigh…”</i>
And they continue…
Oops! My bad in trying to use html tags…
ji, student loan relief is a political issue. Maybe student loans weren’t the best example to use in a discussion about making life easier for others. I am all in favor of making life easier for others, but it becomes problematic when, in order to make life easier for some, I impose burdens on others. Forgiving student loans necessarily means that taxpayers receive the burden, or that the banks swallow the loss. It is hard to talk about one side of the coin and to prohibit talking about the flip side.
Coming late to this discussion. I would say as a general principle, yes, we should try to make life easier. There are some good comments about how we as humans seem hard wired to think people after us need to experience the same hard things we did. Seeing friends go through medical residencies that required them to work superhuman hours, the whole system looked to me like a giant hazing ritual that the profession has convinced itself is necessary and can’t be changed because the new doctors have to experience what the old ones did. I’ve heard arguments for doing it this way, but I’m not convinced.
On the question of student loans specifically, I’m open to some kind of forgiveness, but I agree with some other commenters that a prerequisite to that should be systemic reforms that end or limit the extent to which future students can get in debt. There’s really no point in any kind of large scale forgiveness now if we have to repeat it in a decade or two.
Lastly, with apologies for going down policy rabbit holes that are a bit of a distraction from the author’s main point, I do have one comment based on my personal experience with student loans: we began paying off loans for my wife’s graduate school loans during a period where the federal government was able to borrow at rates close to zero, and yet somehow we were charged nearly 7%, more than we were paying for the mortgage on our house. This should not be a profit center for the government. If we must have a system of financing higher education using government issued debt, maybe we should require the interest to be closely tied to the interest rate the government pays. A simple way to do partial loan forgiveness that would likely feel morally defensible to a majority of voters would be to retroactively apply that lower interest rate, and send refund checks to people who have paid off their loans and had interest overpayments. I suspect some current borrowers would find their balances have shrunk dramatically.
@Quentin This is exactly the sort of reform that I have advocated for. I actually think that student loans should be nationalized and the interest rate should be tied to the 10-year treasury. One major problem with student loans in general is that so many schemes allow for the balance to grow, so they are negative amortization loans.
One side note: because of the pause in student loan payments, the real value of student debt was reduced by over $10k due to inflation and the fact that while student loan repayments were paused, they did not accrue interest. Whether people realize it or not, the student loan payments that began during Trump and continued well into the Biden admin represents a significant reduction in the real value of student loan balances.
thanks to all who finally pointed out that loan forgivess comes out of taxpayer pockets and thus does affect people who paid off their loans.
I am against loan forgivess in most cases – people need to live with the consequences of their decisions, and I agree with the „skin in the game“ idea- but the whole system needs reform and education must become more affordable.
bottom line – we should make things better for the next generation, not necessarily easier.