Let's get this out of the way first: Most people with student loan debt are better off than people without a college education. "About half of young college graduates with student loans (52%) live in families earning at least $75,000, compared with 18% of those without a bachelor’s degree." And about half of all outstanding student loan debt was used to pay for graduate school.

Now let's discuss two of the arguments for student loan forgiveness I've seen on this sub.

The #NotAllGrads Argument

"Yes, most college grads are better off, but not all of them. Some make very little or no money at all." There are at least three good responses to this:

1. There are already income based repayment programs in place that tie a person's payments to their income or lack thereof. As a student loan scholar from the left-leaning Urban Institute said at a forum, we already have “a system that says, ‘If you cannot afford your loan payments, we will forgive them.” Whether we should have a blanket loan forgiveness program “that says, ‘Let’s also forgive the loan payments even if you can afford them’ is another question.”
2. Just because someone isn't earning much today doesn't mean they won't earn enough to pay back their student loans in the future. People tend to make more money as they get older. As an anecdote, my first job out of school paid about $35k. Three years later, I made six figures.
3. If you're worried about helping poor people, guess what? General programs directed at all low income earners would benefit the relatively few people who went to college and aren't making much money and poor people who didn't go to college. We should do that kind of policy instead.

We Should Make College More Affordable

We should. Forgiving the student student loan debts of people who already went to college isn't going to make college more affordable. To do that, we need to tackle the tuition issue.

A variation on this is "if you want law students with elite degrees to be able to be public defenders, civil rights lawyers, and other more progressive jobs at a higher rate, something has to be done about the debt." As I responded to that comment, we did exactly that. It's called Public Service Loan Forgiveness. If a person works for a government or non-profit, their loans are entirely forgiven after ten years. Sure, they make payments during those ten years, but as mentioned above the payments are tied to their (relatively) low salary.

I know. Both my wife and I went to law school, and we're both using PSLF to have our loans forgiven. If the justification for student loan forgiveness is helping people who want to work for non-profits, there's (a) no need to forgive everyone's student loans, and (b) no need for additional forgiveness at all because we already have programs that do that.

Conclusion

Let's be real. Blanket student loan forgiveness is populist red meat for relatively well off young people. If we're concerned about people who are struggling, we should spend the money on a universal program to help low-income people, not a program that only benefits people with student loans. If we want to make college more affordable, we need to cut the cost people pay going forward, and forgiving student loans doesn't do that. I'm sure there are plenty of other arguments I'm missing, but this is meant to be a discussion, not an effort post. Change my mind.

[To be clear, I recognize that forgiving student loans is a politically useful policy. Populist policies are very popular, obviously. I'm just saying there are much better ways to be spending that money, if we're being honest.]