Why I Don’t Understand Opposition to Student Loan Forgiveness

Arguments about “fairness” ring hollow.

Student loan forgiveness is a hot topic these days. Democrats are pushing Joe Biden to erase $50,000 in student loan debt for all borrowers. Meanwhile, many people are fighting against it. That is very confusing to me.

I have seen a lot of arguments against student loan forgiveness, and none of them make any sense to me at all. Everything from the idea that borrowers knew what they were getting into to a basic debate over “fairness” all seems to feel like petty potshots at people who got hosed by the system.

So, I’m going to go through a couple of major arguments against student loan forgiveness and explain why I think they’re wrong.

It’s unfair to people who have paid off their loans

This is the basic argument that a lot of people have. “I paid off my loans, why can’t they pay off theirs?”

First off, that is a fairly privileged position you’re sitting in there. Through some combination of skill, budgeting, and pure dumb luck, you found a way to pay off onerous loans in a reasonable amount of time. Maybe you got a great job right out of college. Maybe you invested in Bitcoin early on. Maybe you worked three side hustles and threw every extra dollar at your loans.

No matter how it goes, congratulations, you did it! Now, please explain to me why other people should have to suffer when the vast majority are overburdened by these loans through no fault of their own?

This mentality falls in the “I had to suffer, so everyone else should suffer too” mindset. At the risk of being ageist, it’s something I hear from a lot of Boomers (although not all Boomers, and I’ve heard it a lot from younger folks as well). I absolutely hate it.

Having paid off my loans, I have the opposite mindset: “If I had to suffer, then nobody else should have to suffer as I did.” Student loans are predatory in the first place, and the idea that we should have to pay the government interest on a loan that is required for higher education is ridiculous. At least make the loans interest-free, although I’d really like to see free universal postsecondary education.

As a side note, I’ve seen arguments that we should forgive all loan interest paid instead of just forgiving the loans. For many people, that would clear their loans anyway, as they’ve paid far more in interest than the original amount of the loan.

You should just work harder or get a better job to pay off your loans

Ah yes, the classic idea that you should just “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” work hard, and reap the rewards. Anyone who doesn’t is just lazy and/or entitled. This is another “old-fashioned” thing — a lot of the older folks I encounter feel like younger folks are too lazy to work hard, move up in the company, and push for raises to pay off their loans and retire with a cushy nest egg.

The problem is, the bootstrap mentality is just plain wrong. By and large, people who can do this have several advantages over everyone else, whether that is race, sex, or simply the ZIP code they grew up in. It just doesn’t work like that anymore — honestly, it never worked like that for anyone but a handful of privileged few.

The fact is, people are working low-wage entry-level jobs ten years after graduating with a mountain of debt because many employers don’t promote from within and don’t do a good job of grooming younger workers for management.

My friend group falls into many of these tropes. One friend is watching a new generation of 20-somethings get more opportunities than they ever did when they started working a decade ago. Several friends have worked nothing but entry-level jobs since graduation because nothing is available to them. These are people who have strong degrees in STEM fields — the surefire moneymakers — who have been left behind by an economy that doesn’t value them.

As for the whole “work a bunch of side-hustles,” the hustle mentality isn’t for everyone, since it can cause major burnout and wreck your life. Even so, many people put in 60 or 80-hour weeks just to pay the bills. Their side-hustle isn’t a way to make extra money, it’s a way to simply survive. Side-hustles have become a necessary part of life for a large chunk of the population, whether they like it or not.

You should have read the fine print

“Why are you complaining about the loans,” the argument goes. “They put it all out there in black and white. It’s your fault if you didn’t understand what you got yourself into.”

First off, why are we asking literal teenagers — people who we have decided are not old enough to drink — to understand the terms of a life-altering loan of tens of thousands of dollars? These kids are fresh out of high school, and anyone who graduated in the past 20 years will likely tell you that their school did not prepare them for the mountain of paperwork that faced them going into college.

Second, when you sign those papers, you are hustled through a lot of paperwork with a lot of fine print that does not get adequately explained to you in most cases. You are often excited to be going off to college while also under a lot of pressure to sign your life away. Combine that with the mind of, and I cannot stress this enough, a teenager, and you get a recipe for this ongoing crisis.

I have friends who made their best effort to understand the loans they were signing and still got screwed. Again, these loans often have high interest rates that high schoolers are not taught about, and colleges often over-promise on their degree programs and the jobs you can get when you graduate.

There are also for-profit colleges that offer questionable degrees and have dodgy tactics, including taking out loans without the borrower’s consent and taking out loans after they were no longer a student. I’ve got several friends who went to for-profit colleges who were lured by false promises, only to have those colleges close down years later. Now all they have is a worthless degree to go with their massive debt.

Oh, they should’ve known better? Might I remind you again that they were teenagers?

It will disproportionately help doctors/lawyers/the upper class

One of the arguments I’ve seen against forgiving student loan debt is that it will disproportionately help “upper class” people, like lawyers and doctors. People who say this often suggest that the forgiveness be limited or stratified by income, or otherwise use this argument as a “gotcha” for people who wear “eat the rich” shirts.

My response to that is: so what?

We need lawyers and doctors, and many people don’t go into the field because it’s so expensive, even if there is the chance for a big payout. There is also a shortage of rural doctors and family doctors because those fields aren’t lucrative. Imagine wiping out the student loan debt for doctors everywhere, allowing them to pursue jobs in rural areas without having a loan over their heads.

Same for lawyers. Public defenders are hard to come by these days because it doesn’t pay well. How many more lawyers would work as public defenders if they didn’t have loans?

Now, before you call me out for not being a good Millennial socialist, hear me out. These professionals aren’t the people we target when we talk about a 90% wealth tax. No, we’re talking about people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Warren Buffet, and Bill Gates. These are the people who pay for their kids’ college by donating tens of millions of dollars for a new sports complex to be named after them. Generally speaking, they don’t take out student loans.

Conclusion: What’s the big deal?

Seriously, I don’t understand why everyone is in such a huff over this. I don’t understand the whole “rugged individualist” mindset that is so prevalent in America. We are social creatures, and we have thrived as a species by working together and helping each other.

Student loans do the opposite of that. High school graduates are promised a strong future with a college degree, but it’s shrouded in arcane loan terms that many people in their 50s don’t understand, never mind teenagers. Then, when the promise of a good job for getting “any old degree” dries up, they’re stuck with an unpayable bill.

And now, the same people who promised a better future at a reasonable interest rate are mocking those people who will never pay off their loans because of their elders’ bad advice.

“You should’ve gone into a STEM field,” they say, having encouraged their own child to get an English degree.

“Why didn’t you consider going into a trade school?” they ask as though they never pushed their kids into a bachelor’s degree from an expensive private university.

“The terms were there in black and white,” they say, even though their credit is a wreck because they don’t understand how credit card interest works.

Seriously, our kids are supposed to have a better life than we did. Why are you fighting this? What is there to be gained by suffocating an entire generation with unpayable debt that you foisted on us? Is it supposed to build character? Because I’ve had more than one friend become suicidal over their student loan debt. I don’t know how depression and suicide build character, but I’ll gladly listen to you try to explain it to me.

Student loan forgiveness would lift millions out of poverty or near-poverty. People throughout the country would suddenly have excess income that they could use to buy things, start businesses, and stimulate the mythical economy that everyone seems to think is more valuable than the lives of the people that contribute to it.

The education system has been broken for a long time. It’s time we did something to fix it.

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