I recently had a piece in Front Porch Republic on the student loan forgiveness debate. Spoiler: I pretty much come down in favor of it. I view the whole idea of student loans as, at best, suboptimal. It’s true that loan forgiveness wouldn’t fix the ballooning cost problem, but I guess I feel like the ballooning cost problem basically lets those in debt off the hook.

There are definitely complicated moral arguments here that people can disagree about. But I don’t see a moral case against forgiveness. Some people say “I worked hard and paid my loans off, if other people’s loans are forgiven that’s a slap in the face.” That’s sort of true as far as it goes, but what it suggests to me is not that others should be forced to pay, but that you shouldn’t have had to yourself.

Do I take this somewhat cavalier attitude about other types of borrowing/loans/debt? No, not really. I’ll say more about why I feel student loans are different, but here’s the heart of the original piece:

To deny someone the opportunity to afford home, marriage, and family is barbarous. Yet we hear over and over again that this is happening in regard to the price of housing and the burden of college costs and student loans. We hear it from people who are now in their 30s or even their 40s and have absolutely no prospect of ever getting out from under their debt burden.

To build and sustain systems that routinely deny these milestones in life is a crime of far greater magnitude than that of a student who fails to pay off a loan taken out based on cynical advice and dishonest promises. Anybody decent, but particularly anybody who considers himself a conservative, can disagree over the details of reforming the debt and loan situation in regard to higher education. But I do not see how people can disagree that the current situation is an injustice. If you’re pro-family but against reforming higher education, you’re making clear which set of values means more to you.

Also:

It’s often said that the subset of individuals with student loans are, essentially, the rich. But many of them would more realistically be described as downwardly mobile, an embodiment of a generation doing worse on most counts than the one before it. There’s a difference between being responsible and working your ass off for no payoff; there’s a difference between teaching someone a lesson and immiserating them for life. No pain, no gain—but work ethic and a just payoff have, and must have, a mutually reinforcing relationship. Virtues and good habits might have inherent value, but they cannot exist or be cultivated in a vacuum.

For more of my thoughts on housing, spending/saving, generational attitudes, etc., check out this sort of informal three-part series (three long, personal essays that happened to cohere in a way I really liked): here, here, and here.

But here’s what feels different about student loans. Look, I’m not a lender, a lawyer, or any kind of expert on this. But this is what it looks like to me. And I can tell you that at the age of 18, it didn’t look like anything to me because I knew nothing and certainly lacked the judgment and foresight to indebt myself potentially for decades. Thank God I had parents who gave me very good advice on all these matters.

Student loans seem different from the other two most common loans—mortgages and car loans—because you’re not necessarily getting anything for your debt. At best, you’re getting the future promise of something. You pay your mortgage every month, and you get a house; you pay your car loan, and you get a car. You default, and the bank takes your house or the repo man comes for your car. (Actually, you might still owe on your mortgage after a foreclosure sale, but unlike student loans, you can seek to discharge that debt in bankruptcy.)

But student loans are more like a business agreement or a contract laying out an arrangement in the future. The colleges say, “take these loans out to earn your degree, and you’ll make a lot of money and have no trouble paying them back.” When the colleges’ side of that deals falls through, it’s analogous to breach of contract. And if you’re in such dire straits that you actually default, there’s nothing other than the money you don’t even have that they can take from you to make up for it—your degree isn’t collateral, after all—nor can you discharge that debt via bankruptcy.

Legally, of course, what I just said isn’t true. But what college-bound student really grasps what he or she is getting into?

I dislike the idea that businesses (or universities, but I repeat myself) can be as predatory as they want, because after all they have a responsibility to make a profit, but consumers simply have to look out for themselves. Buyer beware is good practical advice. But when buyer beware becomes policy, you’re blaming the victim.

It’s a funny thing. Most conservatives would like to see higher education reformed, or worse. They understand, as do many on the left, that colleges and universities are bloated organizations that overpromise how much their degrees can earn. Yet they still feel that forgiving loans is a breach of personal responsibility, rather than a symbolic and actual way of remediating the harm perpetrated by this dishonest salesmanship. For me it’s a consumer welfare issue as well as fairness one.

I also want to end with the fact that the student loan burden, like the cost of housing, is the sort of thing that should be the bread and butter of pro-family conservatives. Why it isn’t, well, I won’t speculate. Although, I should note that there are many on the right who understand the societal import of this these issues, and don’t view them as simple questions of work ethic and personal responsibility.

What do you think?

Social card image credit Flickr/rachelspeak, CC BY 2.0

Related Reading:

Breaking the Fever

A Hard Day’s Wash, Part 2

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