In an article about Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s plan for reducing student loan-centered debt, The Wall Street Journal asked
What do you think would be an effective way to reduce student loan debt in the US?
Getting government out of the way of the economy so graduates can get jobs and pay their debts is the first and most critical step.
For the future, we need to require colleges and universities to publish the median and mean first-five-year annual incomes for their various majors.
In addition, we need to require colleges and universities, either individually or as consortia, to be the sole lenders of last resort to their students
We also need to remove government altogether from the student loan industry, as lender, as loan guarantor, and from any other role.
Finally, the only legitimate way for graduates to reduce their student loans short of repayment is through ordinary bankruptcy. We need to force our government to eliminate its ban on bankruptcy discharge of student debt.
Biden’s “plan” unfairly singles out private colleges/universities by not having their students’ debts ameliorated, a deliberate attempt to punish them; he’ll only mitigate the student debts for graduates of public schools and those who were cheated (under his definition of cheating) by for-profit schools.
Even worse, by making it so students don’t have to repay all of their debt through his forgiveness bit, Biden will greatly diminish, if not destroy, the student loan market, shifting the whole thing onto the backs of taxpayers, unless the methods outlined above are enacted.