Should we bail out student debt?

BY COLE WHITE | Opinion Editor | Most college-aged readers probably didn’t pay much attention to the financial crisis of 2008. They probably won’t remember the $700 billion bailout received by the very banks that orchestrated that collapse.

The cause? Selling houses on loans that people were incapable of repaying.

We righted that ship while rescuing the companies that nearly ruined us.

Meanwhile we forgot about the people that can’t afford houses: an alarming number of college graduates—a generation that’s being shut out of the American Dream.

Let me point out that I’m not an economist. I’m not saying that this is an actual solution; a bailout wouldn’t fix this problem. This is still something worth thinking over because it speaks volumes about what our society prioritizes.

I know most readers will paint me as another entitled Millennial refusing responsibility for accrued debt. However, I don’t have a dog in this fight. Uncle Sam has graciously covered my tuition in return for five years of carrying a rifle overseas.

With that being said, I can still recognize this as a problem. The $1.2 trillion debt bubble is growing.  The class of 2015 graduated with the largest amount of average debt to date.

I understand the arguments against it. You’ll hear anecdotal stories about someone who worked their way through it, probably using some bootstrap pulling technique. You’ll hear someone who took advantage of all the assistance available.

Those stories are all true. Scholarships, work-study and part time jobs are important for diminishing debt. However, we can’t implement those programs retroactively and cure the mountain of debt college graduates are already buried under.

Was there recklessness and irresponsibility involved? Yes, but that’s not what we should focus on.

The difference between these graduates’ recklessness and that of the banks and Wall Street is that this recklessness was built on kids who, largely, didn’t know any better. These financial matters aren’t taught in high school, which only paved the way for a generation to be duped into financial crisis. The banks? They were well aware of what they were doing.

This doesn’t boil down to kids not wanting to own responsibility, this boils down to economics. We have millions of people that aren’t buying houses, that aren’t starting families—everything we need as a nation for our middle class to thrive.

You can call it socialism, but we all have to admit one thing: socialism already exists and recklessness already pays for wealthy corporations. Our country, however, is not made of corporations—it’s made of individuals.

College is an investment. Our problem is that we’ve fostered an environment where participants exist to support that investment rather than having that investment support them.

We’re going to have to do something about this eventually. People have mocked Senator Bernie Sanders’ proposal to make college tuition-free, but is that really a terrible idea? A bailout may be a ridiculously unrealistic proposal, but there’s one question we need to think about:

If we can so easily say that a company can be too big to fail, why is it so hard to say the same about our futures?

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