Here's What I Have to Say to People Who Oppose Biden's Student Debt Forgiveness Program

You need to read this.

Dunning Kruger is an effect that occurs when an individual’s lack of skill or knowledge in a specific area causes him to overestimate his own competence. Michael Scott, the Steve Carell character in American sitcom The Office, had a bad case of Dunning Kruger, which the show’s writers mined for comedy gold.

Most episodes center around Michael pretending to know things he stands no chance of understanding, which always elicits heartless chuckles from us, his adoring audience.

There’s a flip side to the condition of Dunning Kruger wherein people who excel in a given area mistakenly believe that the task is simple for everyone.

I must suffer from some version of this because the collective tantrum of Americans in opposition to President Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan has actually surprised me. I tend to assume that most people feel the same way I do, which is outrage at an unfair, rigged, even racist system where student loans are a predatory debt trap.

Apparently, I was wrong.

This resistance to debt forgiveness makes me angry for many reasons. One, it reeks of selfish disdain for the needs of others. Two, it betrays a woeful ignorance of how the world works. Three, it shows no awareness for the social good of having an educated populace. Four, it feeds into my deepest fear, which is that we humans are too stupid to do what benefits everyone if it doesn’t benefit ourselves.

This would, of course, make Ayn Rand Objectivists and rapacious Gordon Gekkos of us all: greed is good, and greed perfectly captures the “essence of the evolutionary spirit.”

I don’t believe that greed is good. Predatory lending practices in general and in the education sector are just that: predatory. In a growth-at-all-costs capitalist model—one which we are just now beginning to understand is unsustainable at a global level—corporations have a legal mandate to maximize profit. If a CEO fails to deliver lucrative market shares, out goes the CEO.

It’s really that simple: shareholders want ever-increasing returns on their investments. They want to socialize risk and privatize profit.

This is the American Way.

From this segment of American capitalists and their supporters (oddly, those who never went to college, bear animosity toward those who do, and dismiss higher learning as “socialist”), the chorus of protest against debt forgiveness is deafening.

One of their principal arguments is that student debt cancellation is fundamentally unfair, usually something along the lines of “If you borrow money, it’s your responsibility to pay it back,” or “I paid off my student loans. Why can’t you?”

In principle, paying back borrowed money is correct. In reality, however, paying back borrowed money seems to be a legal and moral imperative that is unevenly applied. Case in point: Republican members of Congress whose Covid-Relief PPP Loans were recently forgiven. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has $476,000 in loans that he does not have to pay back. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), $180,000. Kevin Hern (R-OK), $1,070,000. Roger Williams (R-TX), $1,430,000. Brett Guthrie (R-KY), $4.3 million. Carol Miller (R-WV), $3.1 million. Mike Kelly (R-PA), $974,100.

Need I go on?

What kind of country bails out banks and doesn’t bail out students? Why are we so willing to overlook the 120 publicly traded companies that received massive PPP loans, companies that grew substantially as a result, but were never asked to pay back that money? Or this company, FreightCar America, which was approved for a $10 million PPP loan, and then closed its plant and moved all its manufacturing jobs to Mexico? Where are our priorities?

By comparison, a $10,000 per person debt forgiveness is nothing. It’s chump change.

But let me explain why people get into student debt in the first place.

62% of Americans twenty-five and older don’t have a four-year college degree, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Current Population Survey data. Financial considerations are a key reason. Most people simply can’t afford a college education. 36% are supporting a family, which makes it nearly impossible to pay for college.

But the cost of not having a college degree means a lifetime of drudgework—low-end, service industry jobs like Wal-Mart. Starting pay at Wal-Mart is $11.00 an hour, and that’s actually a few dollars above minimum wage. How can anyone afford an apartment on $11.00 an hour? How can they support a family? The only way to dig yourself out of the hole is to get a degree that will (hopefully) open doors to better paying jobs.

Do we see now why people are willing to go into debt to secure their futures?

As usual, the “pay what you owe” school of naysayers is looking in the wrong direction. The problem isn’t debt forgiveness. It’s predatory lending and for-profit schools (e.g., University of Phoenix, DigiPen Institute of Technology, etc.) While only one-tenth of college students attend for-profit schools, they account for nearly half of all students’ loan defaults. Why? Because the accreditors that are supposed to make sure schools provide students with a quality education are not government agencies. They don’t work for people; they work for profit.

“Accrediting agencies should not be allowed collect their fees, certify schools’ eligibility for billions in federal dollars, and then walk away when those schools defraud their students or leave students with huge bills for useless degrees,” Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) told investigative, nonprofit newsroom ProPublica in an email.

Again, I say: shareholders want ever-increasing returns on their investments. They want to socialize risk and privatize profit.

Another argument made by the no-debt-forgiveness crowd is that most people don’t have student loans. This wooly-headed thinking makes me do a spit-take with my coffee every time I hear it. As previously stated, most people don’t have student loans because they can’t afford to go to college in the first place. I’m one of those people. It may or may not surprise you to learn that I couldn’t afford to finish my degree. Paying rent, a car note, car insurance, food, and the thousands of dollars needed for even a public university education was beyond my means—and that was back in the 1990s. Imagine what it costs now.

If I could afford it, I would love to go to college, even today. I’m one of those voraciously curious freaks of nature that actually enjoys academia. And there are plenty of others like me who are just as cash-strapped. What’s the social cost to all of us when good students can’t go to school?

In the end, you have to ask yourself one simple question: is society better off when its citizens are buckling under the weight of student loan debt or when its citizens can afford an education? And if debt-free education is available only to the ones who can afford it, where will that leave us in ten years? In twenty?

It is my most fervent belief that housing, healthcare and higher education are human rights. Society is stronger, wiser, and less susceptible to demagoguery when its people are educated—and just as importantly, educated without incurring ruinous debt. There are thousands of Americans near retirement age or beyond who are still paying off student loans.

That’s criminal.

Just as criminal is the fact that universities, not just for-profit universities but most universities, public and private, would rather hire part-time adjunct (cheap, non-tenured) professors than full-time tenured or tenure-track professors. On average, an adjunct is paid $3,500 per course, and since a typical course semester lasts 15-17 weeks, that means an adjunct is a part-time employee entitled to zero benefits, retirement or healthcare. This is why a shocking number of adjuncts live off food stamps and sleep in their cars.

The best and brightest among us, the ones tasked to educate our children—sleeping in cars.

To become a tenured professor (in most cases) requires that you obtain grant money for research. But 50-70% of all grant money goes directly into university coffers, leaving only the remainder for a professor to fund her research.

How is this okay? And how is it okay for hard-working American families taking out second mortgages to send their kids to college, or alternately, letting those kids go into ruinous debt just so they can receive a subpar education taught by a variety of starving adjuncts instead of a tenured professor?

Consider how many graduates crippled by student loan debt would love to go into public service but can’t afford to? What kind of untold social cost are we paying for that?

So, the next time you hear someone grousing about debt forgiveness, I hope you will send them this article. Have we truly forgotten that a lack of education doesn’t just hurt the unemployed? It hurts America and American business, making us less competitive in the global market.

Lack of education is the root of all of America’s problems. Ignorance allows politicians like Donald Trump to fool the American electorate and for bad administrators to be reelected.

Make higher education affordable for all Americans.

Make education a human right.

Copyright © 2022 Stacey Eskelin

I would love for you to weigh in here. This is a serious issue that needs as much of our time and attention as possible. What are your thoughts?