‘A slap in the face’: Some Americans are mad over potential student loan forgiveness

As the president weighs broad student loan forgiveness, some Americans expressing frustration over a policy they see as unfair.

“While some may view this debt forgiveness as a slap in the face to people who were responsible and paid off their student loans, this is a bigger slap in the face to those Americans who never went to college,” Will Bach, a financial advisor based in Ohio, told Yahoo Finance.

Research has shown that a college degree generally boosts an individual’s earnings over their lifetime. And given that any broad-based forgiveness would cost tens of billions of dollars, all taxpayers — not just by those who have a college degree — would be contributing to the cost of cancellation.

“How can we honestly ask people who did not go to college to subsidize the lives of those who did decide to go to college?” Bach added. “To my knowledge, everyone with student loans voluntarily took them. Every instance of a student loan was a voluntary choice that person made.”

Some right-leaning academics, including Andrew Gillen of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, argue that there are a variety of problems with cancelling student loan debt. These include the overall cost and the fact that forgiveness does not directly address the core issue of rising college costs.

Cancelling $10,000 or $50,000 across the board is “really badly targeted,” Gillen said in an interview with Yahoo Finance.

“There there are people who are struggling to repay their debt, and we’ve got an existing set of solutions — and those solutions aren’t working,” he acknowledged, such as the massive failure of the income-driven repayment system. At the same time, he added, any broad-based forgiveness would be like saying that “a handful of people that are struggling here, [so] let’s get rid of the debt for everybody.”

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