As a guy who had $20K in student loans after *mumble* years of undergrad and graduate study, who started paying them back in 1997 and had them 100% paid off by 2006, my response to such a proposal is
Somebody who agrees: “This idea is breathtaking in terms of its naïveté and stupidity.”
My advice? The biggest mistake a graduating student can make is to consolidate his or her loans. The loan companies are hot to trot to get you to sign on the dotted line for a lower, single monthly payment via loan consolidation. The catch is that instead of paying your loans off in 10 years, you now pay them off in 20…and the loan companies clean up on interest. I was smart enough to see how stupid that was and never wavered when I’d get the almost-monthly offers to lower my payments. So, even if it hurts, never, EVER fall for the consolidation pitch. Suck it up and pay them off.
[Edited 13 Feb 2018 to fix outdated links.]
I think a general forgiveness of student loans would be a hideously bad idea. However, I have a friend who took 8 years as a full time student to get a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. I’m sure he’s now in default on his student loans, because his minimum loan payment is now more than my mortgage payment.
I have to say I think it should be just a little bit easier to discharge your student loan debt in bankruptcy.
8 years to get a BA? I got mine on the 5-year plan, but the 5 years included two part-time semesters with only one class each, and also one semester I didn’t have the money to go to school. So technically I guess I really did it in 4 years spread out over five…
Of course, PolSci is such a joke major, he must have decided on it just so he could graduate and move on.
I don’t even agree with making them easier to discharge in bankruptcy. But I think it ought to be possible to sue the university that counsels one to work toward a useless major. Glenn Reynolds has been advocating the idea that any kind of discharge ought to involve the school having to pay back the tuition it received. I’d be more apt to agree if that were to be the case.
(Although in my case, it was History, and I ended up getting a job with a software company…but I suspect that’s not a common outcome for liberal arts majors.)