First off, you are being very unfair to Ashley Strahm. She has every right to express her lived experience and every right to speak out against the inherent immorality of the student loan servicing industry.
I can speak to the reality of living under an unjust debt burden. Years ago, I had to divorce my first wife because she was a compulsive spendthrift. My half of the debt (marriage means you are saddled with half of all debt even if you didn’t incur them as an individual) was over $31,000. It took me a long time to pay that off. What Ashley shared in her article were stresses I knew quite vividly.
And yes, student loan debt is an unjust burden. There is no other legal loan system in which the loan servicer is allowed to manipulate the terms of the loan such that you can make regular payments but still owe more than the original loan amount.
Now I need to address a factual inaccuracy in your essay. As a university professor since 1998, I have seen significant changes in higher education, including tuition more than doubling. You repeat the common right-wing talking point that the reason tuition has increased is the “access to easy money” provided by student loans. This is a myth. You may not completely side with it, but you do repeat this false political talking point.
You do name the actual culprit for the tuition increase: “that extra income did not go for hiring more professors. It went for extravagant sports buildings, hiring more bureaucrats, and higher pay for top administrators.” The problem is you are switching the cause and effect. The extra income of higher tuition was the effect of the administrative spending spree not the cause. I wrote about the actual causes for the spending spree in my article, https://medium.com/p/512de762d9da, and can summarize here that the two main reasons are the rise of the administrative class as a profession within higher education and universities reflecting the general Disneyfication of society—everyone wants a pampered playground experience.
Another factor is the growing corporatization of higher education. It isn’t just extravagant sports buildings that students are now forced to pay for, there are also the extravagant business school halls and private partnership research centers. I gave statistics in my article that between one-third and one-half of the spending by higher education institutions is spent on these corporate partnerships that benefit the corporations far more than the students.
“Easy-to-get loans” didn’t create that corporate money grab. People like Ashley, including my students, are being forced to pay the bill for the freebees that administrators, consultants, and corporations receive.
And yes, students loans should be forgiven. 100 percent. Period. That’s not a political mantra, it is basic ethics.
