What annoys me about this student loan forgiveness debate is how it conflates high income people with generational wealth with high income w/o generational wealth.

Those things are VERY different.

Students with generational wealth don’t take out student loans.

It’s an upward mobility tax that mainly affects students born into working and middle class families.

A person who makes 100k whose parents paid their way through school is able to save more money over a longer period of time.

Another person making 100k who has 120k in student loans isn’t able to do that until their 30s. That’s ~10 years worth of lost savings.

That doesn’t take into account familial responsibilities that high income/low gen wealth people have. More often than not, they are the highest earning person in their family, meaning they have to provide for the rest.

This is especially common among those who are POC.

Compare to someone who’s parents who can afford to pay for college, they’re aren’t subjected to that responsibility because their parents usually have enough in savings / retirement to take care of themselves.

This is why it’s important to look beyond the raw numbers and interrogate the assumptions we assign to data points. Those small details can drastically change the outcome.

Again a lot of pundit and political types come from some level of generational wealth (mostly b/c unpaid work is a huge part of the media and politics pipeline) and it brings a lot experience bias to these analyses.

Critics often say student loan forgiveness is subsidizing rich people.

And I agree that the government should stop subsidize wealthy folks, but is targeting people who are not even 1 gen removed from the working/middle class the way to achieve that?

Is subjecting upwardly mobile individuals to a lifetime (or close to it) of financial insecurity really going to make things more equal????

Especially as generationally wealthy continue to accumulate?