What Makes Student Loans So Forgivable?

On Why to Forgive Student Loans Rather than Other Debts

Photo by ifer endahl on Unsplash

Student loan forgiveness isn’t popular. I realize this. I’m still unsure about it myself. But its widespread unpopularity continues to unduly insulate careless reasoning about why exactly it’s so verboten. One criticism floating around that I’ve heard from people like

Jonah Goldberg

is this attempted reductio ad absurdum: why not forgive something like car loans or credit card debt if we’re forgiving student loans? Goldberg contends this would be more progressive, given the kinds of people who attend college, and since forgiving car loans is plainly nuts, forgiving student loans must be at least that nonsensical, right?

I’ll set aside temptations to do some bullet-biting here and entertain the idea of restoring the ancient practice of debt jubilees. Let’s just suppose that Goldberg et al. are correct that wiping out car notes or credit card balances is sufficiently absurd to justify this style of argument. What distinguishes student loan debt and makes it exceptionally forgivable? I think there are some easy answers:

1. There's usually a salable asset underlying those other debts. You can sell a car or a house and repay a large portion of the debt, so they’re not as irreversible (outside of intervening forgiveness) as student loans are.

2. Unlike student loans, those other debts can be discharged via bankruptcy. There’s an idea that student loan debt buys human capital (improvements to your mind), so it’s nontransferable, lenders can’t repossess it, and you can’t return it. You’re stuck with it. Obviously, this is largely fallacious, since much of what you’re paying for is a certificate that’s basically required for labor market opportunities and social status that you probably should be able to relinquish for a partial refund, but you can’t, so whatever.

3. The government wasn't involved in making those other loans or boosting prices in the same way. Anti-forgivers often maintain that the government involvement in educational loan-making is the sine qua non of our student debt crisis, but that both distinguishes student debt from these other varieties and imbues the government with an obligation to eat some of those costs:

   They claim that federal programs have enabled. . . unwise lending for unpromising students or unprofitable degrees and juiced the multi-decade upswell in tuition rates. There’s probably a grain of truth to this, which is why it’s so confusing that it fails to mitigate blame for the indebted students in their (the conservatives) eyes: shouldn’t we blame the Boomers who oversaw this dumbass scheme? Or, how about the Boomers who told everyone they needed to go to college? Or, maybe the Boomers that wouldn’t hire someone unless they went to college? The totality of blame does not land squarely and exclusively on students who withdrew those loans. And, if the government is to blame for skyrocketing prices and foolish loans, remind us again why the government shouldn’t be on the hook to eat some of the costs to remedy the situation? As others have pointed out, loans are multi-party transactions, and businesses or lenders issuing injudicious loans aren’t usually blameless or immune from the consequences of handing them out.

4. Debt obligations like car notes and credit cards aren’t systematically disadvantaging a particular age cohort in a way that's imperiling culture and society.

5. Running up major credit card debt or taking on a big car note was just never viewed as responsible behavior. I wrote this in that same essay referenced supra:

   I don’t understand analyzing people’s educational undertakings in a perfect vacuum like this: it’s impossible to divorce the unyielding charges of irresponsibility from the pro-college milieu that dominated the US for decades. Accruing higher education was unerringly characterized as the responsible choice: you had to attend college to succeed.

So, despite the cocksure delivery of people leveling this argument, there is a surfeit of pretty obvious reasons why student loans are distinguishable from these other debts. If you just think about common reasons why a contract might be voidable, such as one of the parties being a minor or signing under duress, you can easily see why people who are barely adults agreeing to gargantuan loans for attending college (which became totally expected and close to necessary) looks suspicious even it’s legally allowable.

But even if we rejected this litany of distinctions that make student loans comparably forgivable and adopted the (obviously flawed) right-wing mentality that maximizing personal responsibility is an insuperable moral imperative, student loans forgiveness arguably still remains on the table. For example, according to the old philosophical maxim that “ought implies can,” people aren’t truly be obligated to do something unless it’s achievable, much to the chagrin of white-collar management everywhere. Maybe there’s an interesting wrinkle here concerning timing and whether the onset of impossibility discharges an obligation that you’ve already undertaken, but carefully applying this idea could entail that people who cannot ever pay off their loans (it’s not within their abilities) aren’t morally obligated to do so.

There’s also a related notion called the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP), which claims that “a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise.”¹ Could student loan borrowers have done otherwise? Yes and no.

J.K. Lund

characterizes their unenviable ultimatum like this: “Young people are increasingly faced with two bad choices: either take on crushing levels of debt and significant opportunity costs or accept that some jobs may be permanently off-limits to them, no matter their skills or experience.” For recent generations, declining to attempt college became a herculean task, especially if you imagined yourself to possess a scintilla of talent or ambition, so confidently pinning blame on these students for failing to buck such overwhelming economic and cultural pressures seems disingenuous.

Now, the PAP is controversial (although I think it’s basically fine), and it’s often discussed in more abstract philosophical analyses involving the metaphysics of determinism and free will, but even if it were imperfect in that context, there’s still a reason it has an intuitive pull. Harry Frankfurt, who is thought by some (but not by me) to have disproved the PAP, agreed that coercion excludes moral responsibility,² and admitted that some kernel of the PAP was true:

Suppose a person tells us that he did what he did because he was unable to do otherwise; or suppose he makes the similar statement that he did what he did because he had to do it. We do often accept statements like these (if we believe them) as valid excuses, and such statements may well seem at first glance to invoke the revised principle of alternate possibilities. But I think. . . [w]e understand the person who offers the excuse to mean that he did what he did only because he was unable to do otherwise, or only because he had to do it. And we understand him to mean, more particularly, that when he did what he did it was not because that was what he really wanted to do.³

So, for Frankfurtians, the relevant question (if we’re partly justifying loan forgiveness by appealing to the excuse that these people effectively had little choice) is whether student loan borrowers were taking those loans strictly because they couldn’t do otherwise and not because they wanted to go to college. But is that right—does wanting to go to college (even a little bit) completely undercut their excuse that the alternatives were so unsavory? For applied ethics (rather than issues of free will), this principle is likely too strong and falsely portrays decision-making as an isolated and sequential weighing of options rather than a choice between alternatives, and I’d argue the context is still partially exculpatory here, even if some part of them wanted to attend.

The best anti-forgiver counterargument would be to admit that taking out loans for college wasn’t actually the inexcusable decision and instead claim that the locus delicti lies within a suite of related choices (like which college to attend, how much to study, what subjects to focus on, etc.). This is plausible, but then people overestimate how easy some of these calculations are about shifting job markets, what to major in, or whether to attend the more prestigious/expensive school: it’s not as straightforward as majoring in STEM, for example, so then we potentially start bumping into limitations on blameworthiness from epistemic constraints instead.

Moreover, beyond expecting potential students to be uncommonly knowledgeable, we’re also expecting them to be ruthlessly honest with themselves about the confines of their talent before most of them have even seriously tested those boundaries, which is tough, especially in our cult-of-smart society. The contradictory penchant of older generations to simultaneously characterize college-age folks as plainly too unseasoned for serious work or professional responsibilities but also perfectly eligible to shoulder unending blame for misjudging which college to attend truly irritates me.

In sum, there are a plethora of credible reasons why the government should forgive student loans rather than other kinds of debt. And even when ceding the conservative aversion to unearned mercy, it’s unclear that forgiving student loans would constitute such an impermissible bit of leniency. Furthermore, the mismatch between the smugness inherent to this reductio ad absudum and the ready availability of counterpoints is striking, and anti-forgivers should either revise or abandon this gambit, which isn’t half as clever as they’re supposing.

1. Frankfurt, Harry G. “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” 66 The Journal of Philosophy 829-839 (1969) at 829.

2. Id., passim.

3. Id. at 838.