Student Loan Borrowers Don’t Deserve ‘Forgiveness.’ They Deserve an Apology.
Whatever the cost of any student loan cancellation program, it’ll just be money we should have spent on higher education in the first place.
After all, it’s not the borrowers who did anything wrong — it’s the country. We’re the ones who should be asking their forgiveness.
Teenagers go to college because we tell them to. Many people in their 20s pursue graduate education because an advanced degree is what they need to prosecute criminals, cure cancer and teach or counsel those teenagers.
We’ve left them mostly on their own to pay for the betterment of themselves and society, and then heaped one administrative burden after another on them along the way.
Pell Grants should be renamed in honor of Ebenezer Scrooge. Franz Kafka appears to have written the rules governing our student debt system, while Rube Goldberg collects the monthly payments.
And if you can’t pay? The legal guidelines in bankruptcy court often demand that those wanting out from under their student loans quite literally have a “certainty of hopelessness.” Those woebegone souls must prostrate themselves in front of judges, begging their honors to declare them complete and total failures.
