Few things irk me more than human-interest anecdotes parading as objective journalism, or college students/graduates complaining about how much money they owe – and think someone else should pay – for their educations.
Perhaps in a bid to break some sort of irritation record, yesterday the USA Today combined these two odious phenomena into one wretch-inducing article about how just cruelly difficult it can be to rid oneself of the student debt one freely entered into.
I won’t go into a detailed dismantling of the piece. Read it for yourself and you’ll see that it really is nothing but a long series of anecdotes delivered with way too little information to have any idea why the debtors shouldn’t, you know, take responsibility for debt they freely incurred. I’m just going to highlight one vignette that sickly typifies just how rationally and morally bankrupt (pardon the pun) both the sentiments of some debtors, and the article, are:
Lenders often fail to offer relief to the neediest borrowers, says a report issued last month by the National Consumer Law Center.
“I feel like it’s a real shame that people like me are coming out of college, weighed down by all this debt,” says Austin Light, 24, a journalist for The Mecklenburg Times in Charlotte. He and his wife have $100,000 in student loans. “My dream is to be a full-time children’s book author and illustrator, and if I wasn’t shackled with this debt, I would be pursuing that.”
In how many ways is this galling?
- We don’t know anything about why Mr. and Mrs. Light have $100,000 in student debt, but we are supposed to become morally indignant just because they feel “weighed down” by it? Did they go to very expensive schools? Did it take them each seven beer-soaked years to graduate? Who knows, but since average student debt for graduates who have any debt is only about $20,000, the rational conclusion must be that they did nothing to control their costs.
- We don’t know what these two studied, but we do know that Mr. Light really wants to be a children’s book author and illustrator. Well, you don’t need to go to college for that, especially one so expensive you incur a debt that even Stephen King — much less a neophyte kiddie lit author — might have trouble paying back.
- Given the overall context of the article, readers are presumably supposed to feel that it should be easier for the Lights to discharge their debts in bankruptcy. But why should people who lent them the money, especially taxpayers who have no choice but to back federal loans, have to take losses on loans that these two freely agreed to pay back when they took them? Isn’t the word for that “stealing”?
Unfortunately, this seems all-too representative of the growing sense of entitlement exuded by many student interest groups. Students should get all the benefits of an education, but someone else should pay for it! And their will is being done in Washington, with several pieces of aid-enhancing, loan-forgiving legislation (which I sketch out here) having been passed in the last couple of years; the Serve America Act – which includes taxpayer-funded education stipends for qualifying “volunteers” – enacted in April; and Senator Dick Durbin (D‑IL), according to the USA Today article, planning to re-introduce legislation that would allow private student loans to be discharged under bankruptcy.
And we wonder why higher ed costs, among other things, seem to be out of control…
