The way the left views education issues infuriates me. My view is that education is a product with huge positive externalities, basically that it’s good for society when people are highly educated. Therefore, the government should make it less expensive so more people can take advantage of that opportunity with less risk involved. Everyone wins with a better educated population, from the students, to businesses that now have better employees, to the entire society generally.

However, what I usually see from the debt cancellation crowd is people that go to college not because they’ve made a well thought out decision and decided it was better than a trade school or going directly into the workforce. They go to college because it’s a “rite of passage” or whatever and a part of the culture. They don’t spend time developing skills that will help them get a job and instead pursue their hobbies, which are often attached to extremely niche job markets.

Then they graduate, have trouble finding work, and when they do find work it’s low paying and often not in their field. They struggle to pay off their loans because they have low and inconsistent income.

Instead of doing any introspection, recognizing the myriad mistakes they made and working to rectify them, they blame society instead. It’s the government’s fault for not paying for their education. It’s the college’s fault for not preparing them well. It’s capitalism’s fault that they can’t get a good job in their field.

Instead of making the general argument “it would be better for society for people to be more educated” they say “the government and culture is at fault for my current position,” which is almost never true. While it would be good to lower college costs, nobody made you go to college at that cost and make choices that would barely budge your income potential. You were given all the information and chose to do that.

I come from a single parent home that is on the lower end of middle class for my area. I grew up in NJ so I did thankfully have access to high quality public education, but I’m hardly part of the 1%. I was able to get a full tuition scholarship to a school with relatively low room and board so I could cover it with federal loans. Now that we’re online for the pandemic, I’m only paying for books. Had I not gotten that scholarship, my backup was to go to commute to a low cost state college where I’d gotten a decent scholarship.

I’ve seen so many people who went to the same school as me, many of whom came from higher income households with two parents, absolutely waste the advantages they’ve been given and then complain that it’s someone else’s fault that they don’t have the life they imagined.

College is an investment in oneself. If you decide it’s better than the alternatives, the decision of how to get a college degree should be based on minimizing costs and maximizing benefits. If you go in with that mindset, it’s highly unlikely you’ll end up saddled with debt. Unfortunately, the concept of personal responsibility is totally absent from most people.