What's your take on student loan forgiveness?

@Roadsterrider I can't disagree with you, not entirely anway. What I do know is that we have to do something. Kicking the can down the road isn't acceptable. I refuse to accept that we cannot find a way to resolve this mounting crisis.

@Ontheroad We as a nation spent a few decades telling kids that to be anything but a janitor, they needed a degree in something so they could live the American Dream, back in the 60s, an engineering degree, a nursing degree, meant a better position, back then about 7% of the people in the US had a degree, today almost 40% of people over 25 have a degree. A lot of them are working outside the field of their degree, or not working. Some of it is based on their own choices, HR degrees, like women's studies or ethnic studies, The branch of the company I work for has about 500 people in the building and a few more who work remotely as I do. There are 3 people in HR. Is it worth spending $100K to be a teacher if you only get paid $50K a year?

A little common sense and critical thinking would go a long way in fixing some of the problems we face. I made a lot of stupid decisions when I was younger and I worked hard to pay off each stupid decision. If someone bails a person out after every stupid decision, the lesson is never learned and the same stupid decisions keep getting made over and over. Any business, education included don't lower prices if they aren't having any trouble moving the product. Mike Rowe is a hero of mine, there is nothing wrong about being a plumber or a mechanic, or any other trade that doesn't require a degree,

I started as a mechanic at 18 years old making 3.35 an hour, today I make about 60 an hour. No degree required. I know other mechanics that work on their own making a quarter to half a million a year. I got a little greasy in the beginning, but experience paid off.

@Roadsterrider Not at all. The government underwrote & guaranteed the loans, and they are getting paid by the government rather than the students. Given that some of the lenders were in cahoots with the most egregious for-profit educational institutions that were fraudulently pushing the loans yet they haven't been charged or put out of business with those educational institutions, the lenders are living high on the hog.

@Roadsterrider You will get no argument from me on going the tradesman/woman route as a profession. An honored and much needed field of work.

@dancingtongue If someone outside the contract has the ability to forgive the loan, the risk in lending is increased. Student loans are guaranteed by the government, the government isn't really writing off that debt, they are using tax dollars to cover it. The mortgage lending crisis didn't just affect fannie mae and freddie mac, it affected the whole financial industry. As did the rules created to allow their operation.

@Roadsterrider But the government IS part of the contract by being the one who guaranteed the loan. When payment isn't made, the government buys the debt, and the Dept. of Education sics contract bill collector on the debtor, for which the contractor gets a sizable chunk of whatever is recovered. What affected Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was that the crisis exposed their practices of handing out loans to people who obviously would never be able to repay, with mortgage brokers fraudulently encouraging people to go in debt way over their heads. The same crap the lenders have been doing for the rip-off educational institutions. I have no pity for the lenders -- they are part of the problem, and because of the government guarantees don't have the same risk as the criminals in the housing and now the educational industries who were ripping off the system.

@dancingtongue I don't have any pity for the lenders or the government, but the terms were disclosed to the borrower before they signed. Their poor choice after the government defaults is to saddle the taxpayer with the debt. There is a contract between the government and the lender, not between the government and the borrower. The borrower made poor choices and the lender is counting on the government to pay the note. The government is expecting the taxpayer to pay the note. The same criminals in government that caused the mortgage crisis have also engineered the student loan crisis.

@Roadsterrider Oh, I agree with your last statement about the same criminals in government AND financial circles through their lobbying efforts engineering both deals. And there are a lot of students who saw an opportunity to milk the system and should have known better, or come from millionaire families who could afford to pay for their educations. But there were a lot of educational institutions and lenders preying on those incapable of knowing better, fraudulently selling them a bill of goods. My goddaughter being a prime example: someone on SSA disability, certified unemployable because she has no attention span worth mentioning, told it was a government program to get her off disability and promised a full-time job after completion of her coursework in an industry that went offshore decades ago. Which is why I like that at least the Biden Administration is trying to sort through the mess and make some distinctions, as difficult as that may be.