Their degree is worthless. They did make a shitty irresponsible decision. It’s pretty predictable. If you borrow money to finance your drama degree at a top shelf private school where tuition is $95k per year there’s virtually no chance you’ll end up with a job where you can pay that off your 400k. But if another kid goes to community college for the basics and finishes at a state university and works and borrows 25k to get an engineering or nursing degree then pays that off. We’re going to punish that person by using his tax dollars to pay off the other one’s loans?So you prefer a society full of young people who have no hope of buying a house, and are also facing decades of debt. That's cool, guess we'll just have to disagree on this one. Let's also tell them their degree is worthless and they're shitty people for trying to better themselves while we're at it.
Maybe like there was in the Old Testament, there ought to be a way for them to sell themselves into slavery to pay off their debts? They obviously can’t be relied on to make their own decisions and are very likely to continue making bad decisions.
Also at least some of these loans in question are for people who make plenty of money but spend it on new cars and luxury vacations.
Make the schools pay off the loans. They’re the ones that charged too much for the service provided. Just go back and tell them they overcharged for whatever degrees based on their value. So your 400k drama degree that is worth 20k, you owe that student 380k. It can be paid off against their school loans or directly to them if they don’t have any. For the engineering degree it would be less - maybe they only owe that person 275k. The schools are the ones that overcharged. Why should tax payers fix it? Especially if the problem is allowed to continue to happen?
Even if they’re going to pay off the loans, fix the problem. Don’t keep giving loans to kids not performing well or pursuing degrees where we already know the salary associated is not going to be enough.