“Cancel student debt” is something some Democrats have long whispered about but rarely put into action. That has all changed as prospective 2020 candidates have begun to announce concrete plans. Elizabeth Warren wants to entirely cancel the student debt of up to 75% of Americans while making college tuition free. She argues that this would stimulate the economy due to the extra income available.
Similar plans have received support from Bernie Sanders and radical freshman congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who is currently under investigation.
Lost in the fray of all this are the people who aren’t crippled by student loan debt or those who already paid it off. Most Americans can agree that college tuition costs are through the roof, but many have adjusted accordingly. Men in particular are leaving college in droves in search of other career opportunities, like trades. The absurd and completely unchecked growth in tuition costs are an enormous factor as to why many are increasingly opting not to go to college.
But are we going to analyze why those costs are through the roof? Unnecessary sports programs, unchecked administrators and fields of study that cost far more than their output all factor in. Not to mention how college has been turned into a cottage industry. Students are funneled into the college system and pressured to make enormous financial decisions while simultaneously having to ask permission to use the bathroom at school.
I can totally relate to this. I wasn’t the most hardworking or motivated student in high school and began to feel as though not going to college would be a good option. Ultimately though, the peer pressure kicked in and I went to Bloomsburg University for a year and a half.
It wasn’t easy at first, but since then I’ve really gained a lot of confidence as to the direction my life is headed in. That’s because since leaving school, I’ve worked full time, taken classes at community college and spent countless hours of my free time growing this website. Holidays, weekends, getting up at 1AM on black Friday when I worked at UPS, you name it. I worked hard, continue to work hard and now, at 22, I feel good.
On the flip side, I know several recent college graduates who work similar jobs that I do only with crippling student debt. They could have made the same choices that many of us did and dropped out, but they stayed. Many of these people are hard-working and feel rightfully scammed by the college industry, but countless others haven’t thought about it until now.
“Cancel Student Debt” Isn’t The Way To Fix A Broken College Industry”
What the “cancel student debt” crowd never talks about is just how bloated the college industry is. There’s a college out there that will take just about anybody and predatory lenders are always looking to sell a pipe dream. The end result is kids stumbling into higher education, getting lost in all the fun and not thinking about their future until age 23. It sucks and it’s hard not to feel bad for these types, but they ultimately made their bed.
I know kids who smugly looked down at people who went to community college that now regret their $100,000 sociology degree from an out-of-state university. Unsurprisingly, these are the same ones who want their student debt cancelled (re-assigned is the more accurate term).
My year and a half at Bloomsburg was a lot of fun, but I knew that staying there wan’t right for me. I still plan on finishing up my education, but what was stopping others from making the same choices? I would have loved nothing more than to party these last few years if I knew y’all would be paying.
Quite literally, they want their peers – who assessed the job market/economy and adjusted accordingly – to pay their student loans in the form of higher taxes. They want an instant leg up on you with the wave of a magic wand, and believe me, that’s what they’d be getting. They would have higher earning potential and no debt. What the absolute **ck was the point of you pulling 50-hour weeks while some kid who took exotic spring breaks on daddy’s dime is getting a bail out for his awful life planning?
“Cancel student debt” is an absolute slap in the face to the American worker, plain and simple. We can work towards fixing the out of control college industry without completely erasing student loans (or again, re-assigned to you, the working-class American). Cancelling student debt would only tell the financially irresponsible that they have no accountability, which will surely end well.
I wonder what scheme 2020 candidates will come up with next in order to buy votes? “Cancel student debt” isn’t the first and it certainly won’t be the last.