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Notes -
Inspired by college loans discussion earlier, I'd like to apply a policy engineering lens:
I don't understand why anyone cares. According to the Fed, median student debt is in the low 20K range, which is an amount that people routinely borrow [to buy cars}(https://www.lendingtree.com/auto/debt-statistics/#Averageautoloanamounts). And the larger amounts tend to be for professional degrees that lead to high income. This does not seem to be a crisis.
There are of course exceptions, such as people who borrow tons of money to attend various private schools, including some sketchy trade schools. Any reform should focus on reducing the incidence of that specific phenomenon.
People who routinely borrow 20k USD for a car usually have a better job or job prospects than the median people coming out of college, and especially better than the median debtor, since income is right up there with credit score for something required to qualify for such a auto loan that isn't for education loans. They also have an asset that can, in a majority of cases, be meaningfully repossessed, and while such repossessions are janky and unpleasant for everyone, they happen at scale in a way that discharges the loan without unspooling significant portions of the United States economy.
College loans guaranteed by the government, at least on paper, make up a value equivalent around 6% of GDP, which isn't quite the right comparison but it's as useful of one as I can provide. It's plausible that this just goes on forever with a bunch of barely-serviced loans, but another fun stat is that people with active loans make up around 13% of the population. And they're kinda the historical go-to example for people who vote, and the last three Democratic Presidential primaries have been full of people fighting with each other to see who can pander the most while dangling 20k USD bills in front of this particular audience; the current sitting President has tried to push a blatantly illegal policies to do so, that was specifically 10k-20k USD per person.
There are other issues on top of this -- proposals that don't change the system mean that this exact same problem will come about again in another decade or two, the problem's particularly galling because university administration where a lot of this money is getting funneled is filled with awful and awfully anti-Red-Tribe people, just as this failure mode was obvious back in the ACA debate era the next step where this debt forgiveness/nullification breaks down will be funny when Red Tribers are joking about nationalizing the university endowments and significantly less so when the actual policy response has considered ten years of its worst enemy's public plans. But it's Bad Enough.
That exaggerates their significance by at least an order of magnitude. Assuming that they're paid off on a ten-year schedule, student loan payments would be more like 0.6% of GDP, and well under 1% of aggregate personal income.
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Because our society doesn’t consider a college degree to be a straightforward investment, it considers it the price of entry into the class of people who deserve a comfortable life without having to work particularly hard for it. And part of our society’s definition of a comfortable life is ‘get to spend 18-21 partying and experiencing life in an extended adolescence’ so it’s just wrong to ask them to pay for their semester in France where they gained the kind of familiarity with French culture that apparently doesn’t involve learning the language. Or pay for their nicer than necessary dorms and accommodations and the professional chef running the dining hall.
‘The traditional college experience’ delendum est. You can get a college degree for cheap, or at least affordable, if you don’t have extenuating circumstances- live at home, get as much as possible done through community college, then commute to bumfuck nowhere tech- cowtippingville campus. But 18 year olds choose not to do that, because they’ve been convinced that spending four years in high school but without having to answer to their parents is a necessity.
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