Clearing up misconceptions about student debt

Luckless pursuits of degrees in gender studies isn’t what caused the student loan debt crisis or the reason a controversy exists over President Joe Biden’s proposal to cancel such debt of up to $10,000 for most eligible individuals and up to $20,000 for some others. Neither is it a lack of initiative or a belief of entitlement among today’s younger generation, or a carelessness in meeting financial obligations.

College tuition increased a whopping 180% from 1980-2020, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Federal student loans charge as much as 8% interest. Mounting debt for many students is not the result of a lack of understanding what they were signing, but rather the consequence of issues out of their control — underfunded colleges more reliant on tuition, inflation, an uncertain job market, and rising interest rates.

It doesn’t help that reasonable discussion of student debt is muddled — sometimes purposely — by misinformation, emotion, and a feeling of “unfairness” by families who paid back their loans at great personal sacrifice, like mine.

So, let’s clarify.

Students today are not lazy. At the last college where I worked, about 70% of students worked full or part-time. Nationally, 43% of full-time undergraduates were employed and 81% of part-time students worked in 2018, according to the NCES.

That is hardly a description of young people who are “elite” or “entitled.” Furthermore, students increasingly are seeking degrees that will earn them gainful employment. The most popular fields of study in 2022, according to Forbes, are business, engineering, nursing, psychology, biology, and medicine.

That contrasts sharply with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' canard that student debt is driven by graduates who major in, as he specified, “gender studies.” In 2019, only 1,333 degrees in gender studies were awarded nationally and — surprise — the mean annual salary for those students was only slightly less than the $60,000 mean salary for all majors, according to The Washington Post.

As a society, certain industries are critical to our nation’s success, so we subsidize farmers — $28 billion between 2019 and 2020, according to an NPR analysis — not to mention the approximately $20 billion annually given to oil companies, per the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. American taxpayers subsidize businesses when the government forgives loans to small companies, authorizing over $650 million so businesses could pay employees and stay afloat during the pandemic. Wonderful.

As for “fairness,” we should strive to make decisions and policies best-suited to the challenges at that time. The GI Bill afforded World War II veterans an unprecedented opportunity for access to higher education to help build a vigorous postwar America; veterans of World War I received only minor compensation. Now, five states and about 25% of companies nationwide provide paid maternity leave, a privilege not enjoyed by previous generations.

It’s not a matter of being unfair; it’s a matter of society evolving and addressing emerging needs. To those students and families who diligently paid their loans, as I did, it’s likely that at some point you will benefit from financial or societal assistance those before you didn’t enjoy, or that your children and grandchildren will.

We provide many constituencies with financial assistance. Why object to assisting students if the goal is to make them more financially stable so they can purchase goods, buy housing, become taxpayers, and add to the economic foundation of their state, their region, and the country? That’s a good result, it seems to me.