Last week you may have seen my brother Dave grimacing on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek. He was the posterboy for Peter Coy’s cover story, “Student Loans: Debt for Life,” about the more than $1 trillion in student loan debt owed by US borrowers.
The article provided a sobering look at the problems facing young adults graduating into a terrible labor market, and the shameful state of higher education finance in the United States. But I was most affected by the comments section.
For some reason articles about student debt bring out a really ugly strain of pro-creditor moralizing. Lots of people apparently hold creditors and policymakers harmless for the current state of affairs, and want to place all the blame on the borrowers. The typical excuses you see for not helping student borrowers take a few predictable forms. Either the student is to blame because she picked a bad major, or because she should have realized at the time she took out the loans that she wouldn’t be making enough money to afford the monthly payments, or maybe she is just unworthy of our pity because she owns a cell phone or a laptop.
I’m not going to argue that students bear no responsibility for their choices, but I think that sort of moralizing misses the critical point that student borrowers are not to blame for the awful labor market conditions they are graduating into. The problem isn’t that graduates don’t have the skills to do the jobs that are out there. The problem is that there simply aren’t enough jobs out there.