The Great Debate Over Student Loan Forgiveness
If you would have told me 48 hours ago that the topic of student loan forgiveness could make people as angry as some of these other debates over issues like we’re dealing with, I would have called you crazy. But yesterday, I watched pure chaos break out on Twitter over a discussion about canceling student loan debt. Although pandemonium broke out, I’m glad it did because some people were able to slightly shift my perception on the topic. Unfortunately, as per usual, I feel like people like me are completely forgotten in some of these conversations.
Before we dive into the weeds and discuss the nuances of this debate to try and figure out a realistic, practical solution, I should probably tell you how this whole Twitter war broke out. It all started with a tweet from the wonderful Batya Ungar-Sargon:
If you’ve read Batya’s amazing book Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, you’re probably not surprised by her take. And if you haven’t read it yet, get a copy ASAP. In short, one of Batya’s main arguments is that the college elite are running the media and journalism, but they’ve forgotten the working class while fueling the silly culture wars. I absolutely loved her book and think it’s one of the most important books in recent years, and I’m grateful I was able to chat with her about it on my podcast.
Before her tweet, I never thought about how student loan forgiveness would go to people who really don’t need it, and that’s because I often think of people like me, my girlfriend, and my mom when I think of debt forgiveness. So, after I saw her tweet, I replied with the following:
(Yes, I now see my typo in that tweet. Maybe the new Twitter CEO will give us an edit button.)
Right now, my girlfriend is in grad school, and that woman works her ass off. She is constantly writing papers, taking tests, and has classes online at home as well as in-person at the university here in Las Vegas. On top of that, she has a practicum at a local inpatient mental health facility. A practicum is basically an internship, and each week, she’s working over 20 hours without getting paid while juggling school work as well. After this final year of grad school, she then has to go through two years of interning for minimum pay before she has her license.
Even with student loans, money has been extremely tight. There have been a few times where I had to pay for the rent and utilities while she waited on her student loan money that came in. And back in September, I was laid off, so we’re not exactly rolling in the dough.
Like Batya, I had some interesting responses to my comment on the topic such as this one:
This is clearly a troll, someone who is ignorant, or possibly both, so I didn’t take much offense to what he said.
But he does bring up an interesting point, which some others echoed, and that’s the choice my mom and girlfriend made. Trust me, I’m 100% in agreement that our choices result in some of our outcomes. In fact, my favorite quote from the AA Big Book says this:
“…we invariably find that at some time in the past we have made decisions based on self which later placed us in a position to be hurt.”
This quote changed my life and taught me to take personal responsibility for my choices. When working in treatment or working with newly sober people, I tell them to tattoo this quote on their forehead to remember that we often cause our own problems.
And yes, there are a ton of people who get pointless degrees, and we’ll discuss them in a little later. For now, lets talk about worthwhile degrees and the issue with our current system of capitalism.
I won’t tell my girlfriend’s story, but she’s been passionate about helping people for a long time, which is why she’s getting into social work. She also works extremely well with the mentally ill. There are people like me who work well with drug addicts and people with mental illnesses like depression, anxiety, trauma, personality disorders, and others, but I don’t think I’d be good working with people with disorders like schizophrenia. Meanwhile, you have people like my wonderful girlfriend who is great with this population.
In our current system, your value is based on what you produce or the effect you have on what you produce. Although my girlfriend is objectively doing something to help others, she’ll never make as much as Wall Street goons or CEOs who make millions while also making our society worse.
By the time she finishes her Master’s degree, she’ll have over $80,000 in student loans. To even come close to paying that back without a ridiculous amount of interest, she would have to conform to our capitalist world by starting a private practice and charging extremely high prices for individual sessions. But this isn’t what she wants to do. She wants to help people who can’t afford $100 to $200 per hour for sessions.
We have a massive homeless crisis in the United States. Children and women affected by domestic violence can’t afford those types of rates. So, is it right that my girlfriend will be hindered by student loan debt for years because she wants to help the disadvantaged populations? Sure, it’s a choice, but there’s something wrong with our system if people trying to do the most good are punished because they aren’t driven by the almighty dollar.
But as I mentioned, Batya’s initial tweet and some of the responses changed my perspective a little. Batya provided some more links such as these:
Before I get to those, I asked James Lynch about his tweet and what he meant:
He replied with this piece from the Wall Street Journal:
I read this piece and wasn’t totally sold on the primary argument. In this piece, it discusses how student loan debt canceling wouldn’t benefit many blue-collar workers who never got a college degree or lower-income voters. I feel like this completely frames the conversation in the wrong way. Zaid Jilani presents this as a zero-sum game where it’s an either-or scenario.
“We either cancel student loan debt and forget the working class or we help the working class.”
I really don’t understand the logic behind that, and maybe it’s because I regularly think about how screwed up our country is. I view student loan debt cancellation as one tiny aspect of the overall issues here in the United States. I want student loan debt cancellation and universal healthcare and livable wages and a lot more.
What I see a lot of people saying is “taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay to forgive the debt of the elite who went to expensive colleges or for people who got useless degrees.”
Too often we debate about who gets the piece of the pie rather than debating about how to make the pie bigger. They regularly have us arguing about who gets the tax dollars that we all pay, and that argument drives me nuts. Personally, it just feels like another way the rich and powerful keep us bickering with each other rather than increasing the size of the pie.
Whenever I hear, “Who is going to pay for it?!”, all I can think of is the military-industrial complex. Whether it’s student loan cancellation, universal healthcare, or other problems, we waste so many tax dollars on dumb things, it’s mind boggling.
I’m sure most of you know this, but check out this graphic about military spending:
Like, that’s insane, right? With how we spend on the military, you’d think every country on earth is constantly attacking us, and if we didn’t spend this much money on the military, we’d be obliterated.
Believe me when I say that I know a lot of people don’t deserve student loan cancellation. I wish I could tell you how many wealthy, privileged kids I knew in high school who went to college to get the most useless degrees you could imagine. I personally know countless people who have degrees and are in careers that have absolutely nothing to do with their degree.
But when I see this argument that the well-off shouldn’t benefit from student cancellation, I think it’s a small price to pay to help people like my girlfriend who is trying to make this world a little bit better of a place.
And I’ve been talking about my badass girlfriend a lot, but let’s talk about me for a second.
I’m a college dropout. I went for a semester, and I couldn’t get squat for student loans aside from paying for my classes. I was given $0 for living expenses or food, so after a semester, I said, “Screw this, I’m just going to start working.” My alcoholism and drug addiction didn’t help, but I just didn’t see college as worth it.
Eventually, I got sober in 2012, and in 2015, I started working at a dual diagnosis addiction treatment center. Since I didn’t have a degree, my role was more peer support. But something I quickly realized was that I was good at what I did, and I absolutely loved the work. Not to get cheesy, but it is such an amazing thing seeing someone come into treatment who is absolutely broken because of their addiction, and then to see their growth and recovery.
While working there, I had clients tell me on a daily basis that they enjoyed my groups more than the groups run by therapists or social workers and that they got more out of it. I even had licensed therapists and psychologists compliment how knowledgeable I was based on my own self-education and love for learning. I realized that this is what I wanted to do. My mom has her Ph.D. and has been the clinical director for rehabs for about 20 years, and she’s sober too. How awesome would it be if I got licensed, and we started our own facility?
On a regular basis, I had people asking, “Chris, when are you going back to school to get licensed?” Trust me, I wanted to, but I just didn’t see the point. By the time I left the treatment center, I was making more money per year than some of the therapists and social workers who had degrees. I did end up going back to school for a little bit and paying out of pocket, but it was expensive. I just can’t imagine continuing to pay that much money for a piece of paper even though you need it if you want to get licensed.
What’s even worse is that not getting my degree is one of the main reasons I was cancelled on YouTube back in 2019. Idiot me thought it’d be helpful to start a YouTube channel talking about mental health and addiction recovery, but then I gained the reputation of the “fake therapist” and had hundreds of thousands of strangers coming after me.
Don’t believe me? Although I was accused of “only doing it for the money”, this YouTuber made thousands of dollars off the accusation.
That’s right. Those two videos alone got about 3 million views, and that’s only two of the four he made.
If you want to know more about what happened, you can check out the book I wrote Canceled: Inside YouTube Cancel Culture.
But we aren’t here to talk about me getting canceled. The point is that we live in a society where you are punished if you don’t go to college, and you’re punished if you do go to college.
This piece is already longer than I expected it to be, but I could write another 2,000 words about how absolutely fucked this country is for people without a college degree. Do you have any idea how many jobs I can’t even apply for because I don’t have a degree? And I’m not talking about in the mental health or addiction field. I have a multitude of skills, and just about every job wants a Bachelor’s degree at minimum.
The only reason I’ve survived and have been able to provide for myself and my son is because I work my ass off. But think about it for a second. Unless you’re willing to pay 10s of thousands of dollars, you’re immediately denied a ton of opportunity. I’ve seen people say, “Well, the average student loan debt is only about $20,000”.
Only $20,000? Are you out of your mind? Maybe it’s because I grew up in the lower middle class and have always lived paycheck to paycheck, but $20,000 is a lot of money.
So, what’s the solution?
Well, I think you all need to stop what you’re doing and buy a copy of Bryan Caplan’s book The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money. And if you’re so inclined, check out my conversation with Bryan on my podcast.
For all of the debating going on, I largely see this as a problem with our society and culture as a whole. Employers put far too much weight on having a degree. Do you know how many lazy, morally bankrupt people have a college degree? The idea that just because someone paid to go to college somehow makes them smarter or more reliable is ridiculous.
There are plenty of careers where you should have an education, but there are far more where college is useless and/or overpriced. If you’re going to be a doctor, mental health professional, scientist, engineer, or something along those lines, yes, get a degree. But as Batya explains in her book, you shouldn’t need an expensive degree to be a journalist. I’ve been writing for most of my life and have been published in some large publications without a degree, so I’m living proof that a degree shouldn’t be needed for something like a career in journalism.
I’m sure if you sat back and thought about it for a few minutes, you could think of dozens of careers where it’s silly to need a degree.
In most cases, college is a game of endurance. All your degree shows people is that you stuck with something for a long time. But in a time where professors rarely fail anyone unless they’re completely screwing up by not showing up to class or turning in assignments, it’s not nearly as valuable as we make it out to be.
What’s awful is that you can’t even have this confirmation because of the power of cognitive dissonance. Do you have any idea how hard it is to explain to someone with a college degree that college is a waste of time and money? That’s like telling someone the brand new car they bought or house they purchased was a terrible use of their money. Dissonance immediately sets in and defends their decision. So, for the most part, I just keep this opinion to myself because you’ll rarely have a rational conversation about it.
To wrap this up, here are some key points and ideas:
Only go to college if it’s absolutely necessary
All industries need to take a step back and really ask themselves if employees really need a degree
Forgive student loans for people adding value to this world
Let’s have a nuanced conversation about whether rich people deserve student loan forgiveness
We should re-evaluate if all degrees should receive any type of debt cancellation because there are a lot of useless degrees out there
Stop looking down on people without a degree because many of us either couldn’t afford it or are trying to make a financial decision that makes sense to us
As a father of a son who is turning 13 in a few weeks, I’m already talking to him about the pros and cons of college and the backward world we live in. The last thing I want is for him to rack up student loans.
I’m currently writing a book about how we’re manipulated by the news, social media, technology, advertisers, and each other. It dives into the psychological history of manipulation, our biases, tribalism, and more.
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