One of the most important parts of the "student debt" debate is that much of that money is likely not spent on tuition, but on living expenses, and "living" isn't the same for everyone.

I lived a pretty cheap life in college and so didn't end up with many student loans, they're all paid back now. Other people bought cars, went on vacations, held parties, and overall lived like they were living in a boomer college movie.

People might argue that the student loan industry and higher education are predatory. I'd counter that the "Taxpayers should pay back my student loans" argument is predatory. After getting an elite education and a chance to join the upper class and for some people the literal 4-year vacation of a lifetime, suddenly it's everyone's responsibility to pay for that for them?


The colleges already get massive government subsidies from the taxpayer, go after the colleges to use that money to eliminate tuitions, rather than further fleecing taxpayers (or unborn generations) to pay for individual's personal consumption. If you think of the actual cost of goods, a university classroom can pay for itself with just a few students, even without government assistance. 10 students paying a tuition of 10k a year, well that's 100k right there, but in reality many classes have a lot more than 10 students to start, sometimes classes can have huge numbers of students in a year. It means there needs to be a lot less administration, but the idea of universities are already virtually self-sufficient by themselves with fairly low tuition costs, and then they get millions in funding from the government (even private institutions with huge amounts of money in the bank get hundreds of millions of dollars from the government), and then they have value added services such as dorms and food plans and the like, it all adds up to something that should be wildly sustainable with much lower costs. Most things I've read suggest the problem is an overwhelming administrative system that dwarfs the size of the actual teaching population, so there's room to cut.

But at the end of the day, tuition is almost immaterial compared to the fact that many student loans went to non-educational causes, and so if people's student loans are forgiven, what we're really saying is that people who never had a chance to become elites because they couldn't afford to go to college should pay for vacations in cancun and keggar parties, we're asking unborn children to pay for party drugs and video games.