Student debt is massive, yes, but why are so few people asking where that money actually went? A cursory search says student loan debt is roughly $1.6 trillion dollars and there are around 4,000 to 6,000 colleges/universities. This is a rough number and the actual amount depends on your criteria, but the gist is that you have a ton of money flowing into a relatively small pool. Yes, I know not every dollar of loans goes to the school, but I really have to beg the question on what these institutions have done with all this money.

Seems like any discussion about forgiving debt should involve going after some of these universities themselves.

In the case of my alum, I think I can tell you: they spent it on housing and amenities to attract more students (quantity, not quality). I watched it happen while I attended. A university operates under the same principles as any other business in this case. Administrators are not innocent here, but they do have to live within the system and work with the incentives they are provided. Loans are made available to students and parents to shop around. This is a big part of what has created the upward pressure on tuition. We’ve revitalized a lot of state school campuses while letting their academics rot. Parents and students see fancy common areas, gyms, cafeterias and living spaces when they visit campuses then use that to decide where to go unless they’re very focused on the education, which they’re likely not because most very focused students require less financial help. If that money had been given to the administrators we are often so quick to villify, this picture may be a very different one.

Turns out "alum" is the gender neutral term for a graduate, not the school. I should've used "alma mater" here. I've never had a chance to learn latin properly and it shows :)

One big name school I've been to had a new gym where the bathroom hand dryers all had custom graphics on them. This is where the money goes.

University administrative costs have blown up with all of the easy to acquire loan money.

Just a few highly paid and many mildly paid bureaucrats doing things which don’t need to be done… or in some cases doing very little at all (I’ve heard stories)

Also lots of fundraising and shiny new buildings which are more advertisements than useful expansions.

This is a great question that no one is really asking. Too much of the conversation revolves around what’s fair for student borrowers and not enough on what in the world these universities have done with all of that money.

My alma mater needed to bring their student center into compliance on the last ~50 years of building code changes. The project was estimated to cost high-8-figures, for nothing but code compliance.

Instead, they spent $120,000,000 renovating it to be shiny and modern and also up to code. I don't understand why it was so expensive, but I'll assume it's not an order of magnitude away from true cost.

$1.6 trillion is "only" a few hundred million per school. If the cost of renovating one building is any indication, it's easy for a university to use up that much money.

This tracks because my alma mater built new housing and a new student center over the course of a few years at the cost of roughly $300 million.

Just housing and feeding around 50 million borrowers while they attend school for 4-ish years ends up being a damn lot of money.

I thought college was expensive until I looked into historical tuition prior to the modern era. Turns out our grand parents, parents, and siblings just lived in a golden age of fair wages and massively affordable and available education.

I am younger than your grandparents but I have children that range for 14-31 and I can tell you that I could afford to go to college based on what I made as a short order cook but my kids would not have been able to earn enough to even pay for school much less have enough left over for life.

It sure feels like schools have taken advantage of the student loan programs to increase fees and tuition while at the same time lowering the admission standards to put even more asses in seats.

I think we already have a solution built into the legal system: Lemon Laws.

From the Great Wiki in the Sky: "Lemon laws are laws that provide a remedy for purchasers of cars and other consumer goods in order to compensate for products that repeatedly fail to meet standards of quality and performance."

Obviously, these degrees did not meet the standards of quality to make "productive members of society" so the universities should have to "buy them back", preferably using their own endowments.

In the short term, it would hurt them immensely - which is deserved for selling a "product" that wasn't worthwhile but in the long term, it would mean that they're more likely to a) keep prices more reasonable and b) make a higher quality "product".

Or repeal the Clinton-era law that made student loan debt non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. In that way, potential lenders would have incentive to determine ability to repay.

>would have incentive to determine ability to repay.

It's a mixed bag. On one hand it should decrease costs and incentivize students into choosing better career plans (ie. not going to college just because), but it will also mean disadvantaged students won't be able to attend because their projected credit risk is so high.

The problem that law was meant to address was that most of the debt being discharged came from a relatively small pool of students who attended very expensive or prestigious schools.

If they had set a limit for discharge to the value of the median cost of tuition, it might have prevented the runaway train of inflated costs in the education and perhaps even medical sector, outside of what was caused by malpractice insurance rates in the 70s.

Also, individualizing risk to the students irrespective of degree choices and economics without dutifully notifying students isn't ethical behavior, especially when they are responsible for the magnitude of the risk by not controlling costs or advocating for the value of the students they graduate.

This is just the Education department doing what it is required to do under various federal programs that have (pretty much by definition) existed for over a decade.

We can have a productive conversation about whether those programs were too generous or had unintended consequences, but millions of people have structured their finances around these programs and the rules in them - it's a rug-pull to suddenly have regrets and oppose the policies only now that the remaining balances are being wiped out.

Yeah it's like this with the people who want to kill Social Security as well. How are people who are supposed to retire in 10 years going to do so if you kill Social Security in 5? Retirement preparation starts when people are in their 20s, so any changes to SS that do not include an equivalent replacement need to be planned 50-60 years in advance.

The common procedure is to freeze everything and let inflation slowly destroy it.

Who cares if you can get a $20k student loan in 2122 when a hamburger costs $70?

I'm all for contributing to admin salaries. I'd even go so far as to say state-funded schools shouldn't charge tuition at all.

That said, I have to agree that tuition definitely seems bloated and many admins make absurd salaries.

Until that's fixed, which seems unlikely in the near future, how do we fix the issue of massive debt that hangs over people for their whole lives?

The obvious solution would be to reduce tuition and other costs, but now we're in a loop. It seems like an intractable problem.

Why not do both?

Forgiving past loans for graduated students does not put future money into the hands of college administrators unless you continue issuing and forgiving future loans.

Fixing the grift and providing relief to those who were grifted should be two sides of the same coin.

Sure, do both. But the relief, as it were, needs to come after the fix.

And frankly, rather than just give a relatively privileged subset of the population some money, we might as well crank up that printing press again and just got a $10K check to every last citizen, student loans or not. Might as well be equitable about it.

That's whataboutism. I'm also against that, but it's not the topic.

Submit an article about it, I'll for sure post my opinions on the matter.