1577
How it feels
(discuss.online)
Do we all think loan forgiveness is the cure for student loans?
Not at all, but loan forgiveness wasn't mentioned in the comic. It's just putting a bandaid on a capitalized educational system that should not be for making money but rather a societal investment into our betterment. Id keep my loans I have left and vote for free education any day of the week if we had the option. (Of course I wouldn't say no to both) But I think some people were trying to use loan forgiveness to breach the doors of free education.
I mean I sold 4 years of my life to the military to not have to take loans out, so I get the gut reaction
The main cause of the student loan issue is the commodification of education. Everyone wanted to go to college and at first it was optional but then as more people did it it became a requirement, then they realized they can charge more and more for education that is worse and worse because a good chunk of people dont actually want to learn / be there. They're just there for the paper that'll let them get jobs and not be unemployed, or even just to say that they went.
I look around and people are playing damn Pokémon Showdown in class, there was that one scandal of an influencer girl who was the daughter of someone important that bought her admission to Stanford(?) and would stream literally about how she didn't care about education she just wanted the college experience.
Hot take: Not everyone should be going to college, High School should just prepare people better. Even if we forgive all loans right now it doesn't fix the issue. Instead of your problem it will just be your kids' problem
While I agree in theory, I'm not really sure there's much that can be done in practice. The genie is out of the bottle here: jobs want the paper, so people get the paper, leading to jobs expecting people to have the paper. An employer is unlikely to deliberately "lower their standards" (in their view) if the pool of potential employees with a degree is large enough for their needs already. Since you can't legislate that employers are not allowed to require a degree, and you can't expect people to not get a degree and sacrifice their own potential future to break that cycle, we're kind of at an impasse.
That's why the only way forward that anyone's figured out so far is government funded higher education.
Edit:typos
Trades are a good option, but how long before plumbing drones are crawling through the sewers?
how long before plumbing drones are crawling through the sewers
That would be lit
What makes you think they aren't already?
False equivalent. People do not choose to have cancer, but some people chose poorly and took out loans they could not afford; that is on them.
What a horrible, uninformed and ignorant hot take.
wym? all humans are perfectly rational actors operating in a complete ideological, moral, economic, and social vacuum; therefore literally everything boils down to personal responsibility and natural consequence.
except for me of course.
Well obviously except for you. And me. Obviously.
But other than you and I, and my immediate close social circle, and maybe yours, EVERYONE ELSE in the world is completely solely responsible for every choice they make as an individual.
Especially when driving. Double especially when driving and in my way.
Is it? I went to a state college to take advantage of in state tuition, commuted because gas for my Geo Metro 2-seater was cheaper than a dorm room, etc to cut my costs down to where I wouldn't need to put myself in debt and got a small scholarship/grant (that in turn came with an in-state work commitment that shaped my choices after graduation). Other people my age made other choices related to college that landed them in massive amounts of debt that I avoided.
If I had known that I could borrow as much as I wanted and expect someone else to pay it off instead of being stuck holding responsibility for my debts, I likely would have made different substantially less frugal and less restrictive choices.
Tell, you what, nix an equivalent amount of my debts, and we'll call it a deal. You don't mind paying off my mortgage, right? Just because you didn't take out a mortgage doesn't mean you shouldn't be responsible for mine, right?
I honestly have no problem with that. I think housing is actually more critical than student loan forgiveness. A debt driven payment to every American under a certain income threshold would go a long way towards repairing the dwindling middle class, and 99% of that money would go towards big businesses anyway.
That said, your individual experience is based on your socioeconomic upbringing and yours alone. You had opportunities others did not, even if they don't feel like opportunities to you. Student loans were sold on a lie to every American high school age child, that the money would work itself out after college. Something no reasonable adult could actually believe to be true but no high school age child had the worldly awareness to doubt.
You buy a house knowing what your monthly payments are going to be. You buy a house on credit you spent a decade or more building. Multiple people have to sign off on you being able to repay that debt and even those are thrown around like candy. Giving 100,000 dollars to a teenager with no credit history who's probably never had a job is irresponsible and crazy. It should fall on the debtors to write that money off because they were crazy ignorant or stupid to expect it to be repaid in the first place.
To be clear, I don't just want debt forgiveness. I want the college lending system rewritten entirely. I want debt forgiveness to those that need it even if that means my debts aren't wiped out.
To be extra clear, I should not have been given that loan, 90% of the literal children signing for those loans should not be able to access them. But there is no other path to college for almost all of those kids, because college has become so unreasonably expensive.
Was it also sponsored by the "I want my kids to have a better life than me" crew who then complains about kids having it too easy these days?
I want them to have it better and easier. But an easier life, not just an easy childhood that doesn't prepare them for their inevitable crushing adulthood.
I want the opposite tbh, kids just don't appreciate it. Send them to the mines first, and then give them an easy adulthood.
As a Gen-X, if I was a kid these days I'd be pissed too. It seems as much grief as they're given by adults, they understand early on they've been given the worst hand.
Our gen made such a big deal about being cynical, yet life ended up being SO MUCH WORSE than even we imagined. Although it does show we were right to be cynical.
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I totally agree with this. If someone is opposed to student loan forgiveness because they had to pay theirs off, that person sucks. But if that person thinks maybe they should get a portion of their payments back too, and not as part of opposition, then I am sympathetic.
Don't take out a loan that you cannot afford.
How do you know what loan you can afford before you have any income? How do you expect a 17 year old who's never lived on their own and only financial experience is maybe a part time job to be able to comprehend money on the scale of 10s of thousands of dollars?
Sure you can try to be smart and look at the BLS data to get an estimate of your income after college, but a ton of minutae gets lost when doing so, such as what you'll make early on in that position vs after 20 years in that position, regional pay differences, etc. that also assumes you'll graduate and get a job like you researched in your field but maybe you picked a field that's about to collapse for reasons outside of your control, maybe the field you picked is already saturated with talent, or is experiencing some other significant shift.
I worked with one person who had gone to university to be a biologist just to graduate right after a significant number of university research positions were closed and laid off, leaving him fighting with folks who have 20+ years of experience for a handful of job openings
Student loans are the one type of loan you can't simply perform a debt to income calculation to determine if you can afford the loan. There's a million and one things that can happen between when you accept the loan and when you start paying on it that can greatly impact the affordability. The risk of course grows with the cost of education, but so does the potential reward.
if that person thinks maybe they should get a portion of their payments back too
I think every one of them assumes they will never get a cent of that money back. They do live in America, after all, the land of "fuck you; got mine."
Change the legislation to give every living person back every cent they ever paid towards student loans, and many opinions would change.
The Republican party would still be completely against it though, so we'd still have millions of boot lickers out there arguing to hurt their own financial situation in order to please their superiors.
Yeah I don't think this covers the situation as much as it's a nice feel good story.
Imagine for a second you are relatively poor, you go to a state school or community college in order to afford it. You have loans, but they are small.
Now imagine you're upper middle class, you go to a private or out of state school and take loans out for a much much larger amount than the other person, with the expectation that you're getting more value for your money (let's ignore the labyrinth there for a second -- this is something many people believe and believing it, for some, makes it true).
Now, both loans are forgiven
Youve succeeded in making the rich richer, giving them both the higher valued education and all of their money back.
Or imagine you're that poor student but you're smart: you got a grant or scholarship making your loans nonexistent, but only if you go to the state school.
Once again, forgiving loans makes the already wealthy person significantly more wealthy and does nothing to benefit the poorer person.
Yes, of course, there's a wide range of reasons a person might go down either route, and I'm absolutely certain there are many millions of people who have gotten loans way above their wealth in order to go to a better school and jump out of poverty (or whatever). This comic ignores the nuance.
In the cancer analogy, this would be a poor person dying or otherwise experiencing terrible health problems because they couldn't get the care they needed, then when a cure is developed, only administering it to the people who could afford care to begin with (ie american health care)
If this is a one-time event it's hardly the solution to the problem. Education should be free or close to free in general.
If that's the case, things suddenly look different. Even only if e.g. state schools are free.
In my country the tuition fee for a state university is around €30 per semester, and that doesn't even go to the university but to fund the student governing body (not sure what's the right translation for the term).
This means, that everyone can get a quality education even if they are poor. In fact, most people I went to university with funded their flat/student accomodation and food with a part-time job while going to university. No debts or financial assistance needed.
This doesn't cover private universities, but (a) the difference in quality and reputation isn't relevant and (b) free public universities means that private universities are also somewhat price capped if they want to stay competitive.
Of course, but that's never been a serious proposal in this country so I wasn't responding to it.
It's feasible to do this today in the US at some schools, but your parents have to really push you to get a lot of scholarships. It's not common.
I'm somewhat torn on this:
Yes, I totally agree that federal loans should be forgiven even if someone pays theirs off.
Private loans though? Not so much. That's basically the same as a mortgage from a bank. Or a car loan even. That money ultimately ends up in the borrower's possession after the school balance is paid. That? I am not so willing to share the cost of.
Debt itself has a history of forgiveness. Western Societies could benefit from being more forgiving imo. 30% apr loans should absolutely be illegal, but thats a lot of credit debt today.
My first car loan had a 26% interest rate. Over that 36 month loan I would have literally paid over twice the total value of the loan if I didn't refinance it after 6 months.
I learned a lot through the mistakes I made that day and have endeavored to not repeat any of those mistakes (and so far I haven't!)
I, somewhat, feel you. My hang up is federal loans are often s pittance
Maybe my FAFSA has the wrong code(at this point, for my oldest). Maybe I should have lied about my assets? I haven't done my research, but it did not seem like my lack of home or non-beater factor in
For me, I do kind of think that if someone paid and then forgiveness happened, they ought to be at least partially compensated if they have any history of being low income. They could have put their loan payments into something else but they didn't so they'd kind of end up screwed over by their slavishly responsible bill paying.
That said: its stupid to not want broad student loan forgiveness because the student loan crisis is literally damaging the economy. Its hurting everyone, even people who already paid their loans off.
Id be ok if there was some kind of reimbursement, but I wouldn't stop student loan reform from happening if it didn't include reimbursement.
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The goverment paying off student loans is like bucketing water out of your boat and ignoring the hole. Like sure, its gonna keep some people afloat for a little longer but the issue hasn't really been addressed, the problem is still there and the cycle remains a perpetual shit storm. The cost of education is preposterous, the people taking these loans dont have jobs to support paying it back, and most of them are too young to have the experience informing them of what a monumental undertaking paying it back will be. If they tried to get the same loan for a house or business they would be denied. There are so many issues to tackle but paying off the loans rewards the groups who created the problem in the first place. It incentivizes them to continue the foul play and prey upon vulnerable youth. Without some systematic reform accompanying the loan payoffs to ensure this doesn't continue we will end up in the same situation over and over again.
While I fully agree the issue is the underlying problem... that is some All Lives Matter shit.
Because basically anyone who brings that up as an excuse to not wipe the slate clean are in that same "We need to think really hard about how we do this and not do anything for another 30 years". Same as most "Banning guns won't stop gun violence" people. It is a bad faith argument that boils down to insisting that the perfect MUST be the enemy of the good.
Im not saying we shouldn't pay off the loans or delay doing so. I'm saying that alone will not solve the problem. We must do both. I never hear discussion on that second part. Ignoring it is foolish.
And yes, the snails pace at which reform would occur is infuriating. It shouldn't take 30 years because some asshats will continue to argue in the nature of "how dare we hurt these businesses?!" while people continue to suffer. It sucks that it likely will, but if we dont start now it will never happen instead of eventually.
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Way too many jobs require degrees to apply as well. Yeah, if you're a doctor, scientist, engineer, or other specialist that really does require advanced education, you need that level of education.
But I'm hiring a new permit tech to process contractor registrations, take permit payments, and answer the phone. It's ludicrous that the city wants them to have a degree in "Public Administration, Fiance, Construction Science, or a related field."
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You don't need to cure cancer, you need to be able to prevent it in the first place.
Ofc this is following the metaphor, for actual cancer you need both.
For student loans you need to fix the system, higher education in Europe is free, but it really isn't, you pay for your education over your lifetime by earning more money with your higher education and thus paying more in taxes and social security.
Ofc it's not a perfect system, but much better than having young idiots be purposely exposed to predatory lending.
Dude.
Fuck cancer, AND fuck people that have that logic about school loans or anything else.
Don't take out a loan that you cannot afford, that is on you.
Totally! If I got cancer free and then a simple and quick cure for cancer came out, I'd obviously wish that that came out earlier, but one would have to be a royal asshole to with that others suffered and died because one had to suffer as well.
I mean I wouldn't want it to not exist but if I just nearly died of chemo + cancer I'd be a little mad if they found an EASIER way to cure cancer...
Cancer survivor here. Nothing would make me more happy to see a simple cure for what almost killed me, the sooner the better. Even if it was just after I finished chemo; perhaps even especially right after it to be honest. Remember that there's always the 5-year time where the danger of the cancer coming back is constantly lingering (especially during the first 12 months). Even if you just finished chemo, that new drug means you won't have to go through chemo again for that cancer no matter what happens from now on. Nothing, and I mean abso-fucking-lutely nothing, would've given me more peace of mind at that time.
That would actually kind of be funny in retrospect. Like, if you survived it, and it was the most horrible, painful year of your life, and then the day the doctor gave you the all-clear, the FDA released a drug that takes care of it in seven days with minimum side effects.
Like any time anybody said anything to me, I would be whipping out my cancer photos and then using that to explain that the universe hates me, and so therefore I am absolved of all sin.
Plot twist, he actually beat up every single kid in the paediatric cancer ward at his local hospital.
I paid off my student loans at the beginning of this month. it took me 16 years and like $65,000, right? If someone else comes in behind me, goes through the same shit that I went through, and then gets their loan forgiven or paid off in a couple of years?
Then I'm happy for them. Good for them, their life is gonna be so much easier without that burden over their head, and happier people means I get to live in a happier society, which means that I get to be happier too.
That mindset sure is a great way to make sure nothing ever gets better for anyone.
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Read all the comments🧵. Nobody mentioned that higher education was free in the 🇺🇲 until a racist made it costly for colors to attend.
Changed the link, since folks had difficulty trickling to the sources.🥁
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I am once again reminded: Humanity is fucking ugly. I'm starting to get nihilists.
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this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2025
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