I’m not at all convinced that President Joe Biden is correct to forgive $10,000 in student debt. Also, his defenders make a lot of very bad arguments in favor of this move. But it may be politically popular (it very well may not, though), and so opponents will need to take on the best arguments, not merely their worst ones.
For that reason, I offer here the three best arguments for the federal government forgiving student debt.
- Student debtors often took on this debt as children, not realizing what they were getting into.
People should pay their debts. A society in which select groups of adults, regardless of any hardship, have their debts wiped away is not a society with order or fairness. But this argument — you borrowed it, you need to repay it — doesn’t perfectly apply when it comes to college debt. That’s because the borrowers are often children, being told by every adult around them to borrow more money than they’ve ever earned in their lives.
I was 17 years old when I signed the papers to take on thousands of dollars in student loans. I was still a college student in the subsequent three years when I kept borrowing. There was no real consultation and no warning about the risks and the eventual costs.
Of course, I paid off my loans, never missing a payment (as far as I can remember), even when my bank account was very thin. But a young adult who was talked into borrowing money at the age of 17 or 18 before she even knew anything of work or monthly bills cannot be held to the same standard as someone with a job who takes on a mortgage or a car loan.
For that reason, student debt could be said to be more worthy of forgiveness than other debts. The necessary corollary to this argument, of course, is that the federal government needs to stop subsidizing student loans for undergraduate study, and colleges need to stop irresponsibly ratcheting up tuition and pushing students to finance their education through borrowing.
- Forgiving student debt might mitigate our Baby Bust.
Millennials and Generation Z are not having enough babies. There are fewer children in America today than there were at the last census. Birthrates are at record lows.
“I can’t afford it” is the No. 1 reason young people give, in basically every poll, for not having children. College-educated 20- and 30-somethings are just as likely to give this answer as their working-class peers. Student debt is an oft-cited boogeyman preventing people from having a family.
It is, therefore, plausible that wiping out or reducing student debt might juice birthrates. People often think (wrongly) that they should have their lives in order before starting a family. It’s like the Success Sequence on Steroids: finish school, get a job, get married, pay off my debts, THEN have a family.
Again, adults shouldn’t demand their life be in perfect order before having children, or they’ll never have them. (They should be married and done with high school, though.) As long as this perception endures, it could be that debt forgiveness is necessary to encourage more adults to have children sooner, which could take the nation off of its dangerous demographic trajectory.
- Maybe it will force us to address what a racket college tuition is.
We are not in a recession. College grads are not a disadvantaged class — not by a long shot. There is no extraordinary circumstance justifying this unprecedented and possibly illegal move by Biden. The only justification for wiping out this debt is that there’s something illegitimate about student debt.
Logically, any forgiveness of debt requires the White House to begin the process of dismantling this system, which bloats tuition, enriches university administrations, and harms students and nonstudents alike.
I’m not really sold on this last one or on the Baby Bust one. What Biden is about to do just strikes me as a really bad policy. But critics should still address these arguments.
