Here's how you get your student debt erased

[Igel]

1. There's no good solution.

But there are differing perspectives. Readers will read Holt's column and come away with his opinion.

Here are a couple of questions. Or more.

You take a doctor from an elite medical school and put him in a non-profit. Was there any value in that degree? Perhaps if he'd gotten a degree from a cheaper school he'd done just as good a job. So he's foregoing a higher than average starting salary for a non-profit or a government job. In the end, it may save the government money and be good for the public. Moreover, both may use that as a recruiting tool, and having the debt erased might make it easier for either to stay in that job as s/he accrues family and growing children. This would be a government benefit that typically isn't included in compensation valuation. "He took a job for $15k/year less, he's underpaid." (But at the end he gets something that has a cash value of $150k, without fretting over present value of that money with all the interest paid.) This, however, is entirely hit or miss. Some qualify, some don't. Hardly equitable.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Ivy League lawyering for the indigent? Probably still a good thing. Even if it's not absolutely, 100% fair. Not everything has to apply completely equally across the board when you're dealing with thousands of laws and dozens of programs covering 300+ million people aged 1 to 105.

Then there's the teacher. Yes, lesser pay, lesser loan. But if they're good in their field, often after paying off their debt they can get a better job. One colleague left and got a $20k/year salary increase. But often, however offensive it may be, teachers aren't tops in their field. Teachers are a small portion of the college graduate pool, but a disproportionate amount come from the bottom 1/3 of their graduating class. (So say surveys, questionnaires, interviews, and this consistently, when their college GPAs are compared to college data. Similarly, most collaborators on a project, if asked for their contribution, overstate their contribution: get self-reports on how much they contributed and most of the time if you total up the contributions you find that the team claims 140-145% of the credit. "Anecdata" is irrelevant here.)

We won't mention those grads who finish school and work for a non-profit flush with cash. Money and loan forgiveness in tandem. Way cool.

Or some ministers who receive housing allotments or live in church-provided housing but who receive low incomes and qualify for low or no payments.

The problem is immediately confusing "public service" with "government work" or "non-profit work" and confuse those with personal sacrifice that should be rewarded or compensated. Now, they can all overlap, or they can be utterly different kinds of things. If you're a doctor who decides to locate in an impoverished area and work for small potatoes you can have a small income and large personal sacrifice and not be engaged in "public service" as defined by this law. You can work for State and get your PhD from Georgetown for a mere $200k in loans while you make twice that a year and have it forgiven--as though that's public service in any real sense or with any real sacrifice.

Best suffers from a different problem. She feels she's engaged in public work, and in a post-Enlightenment culture feelings substitute for thinking and logic, where perceptions are more important than objectivity (and in which the idea of an objective reality is often denied by those horribly out of touch with it), anything like this becomes fraught with problems and riddled with grievance.