A student loan is money that you borrow to help pay for school with the expectation that you will pay that money back in the future. Students have it hard to pay for student loans because they are so young. It’s a major problem in America. Is the government really helping if the loan has to be paid back later? Student loan costs range from $5,500 to $12,500 per year.

 “There are better ways to spend that money that would better achieve progressive goals, like family, food, car, savings and educational purposes,” senior Jacob Prince said. 

This is valid because student loan forgiveness would help students get into colleges without worrying about spending their money on student loans, even if it is after graduation.

 “The student-loan forgiveness is unfair to those who have already repaid their loans,” senior Kasey Flemming said.

 That is also true and those students who have already paid off their student loans are most likely unhappy that the Biden administration is trying to forgive student loans. 

In terms of its scale in budget and cost to taxpayers, widespread student loan forgiveness would rank among the largest transfer programs in American history.  Based on data from the Department of Education, forgiving all federal loans would cost on the order of $1.6 trillion. Forgiving student debt up to $50,000 per borrower would cost about $1 trillion. Limiting loan forgiveness to $10,000, as President Biden has proposed, would cost about $373 billion. President Joe Biden’s plan would cancel up to $20,000 in debt for millions of people who took out student loans.

About 16 million people so far had been approved for the program.  Even $10,000 in debt forgiveness would involve a transfer that is about as much as the country has spent on welfare. The administration agreed to extend a pause in required payments on federal student loans until after June, or until court-issued blocks on the debt forgiveness plan are removed.

Loan forgiveness means you don’t have to pay back some or all of your loan, which would be really helpful for students. So what can the government do to help students since student loan forgiveness costs so much and is very difficult to do for every student? 

“There is no other financial investment that you can make that yields the same economic payoff, in terms of job prospects and how much you earn—your cumulative life success,” Mrs. Lafortune said.  “I’m worried that we’re going to try to impose these one-size-fits-all solutions and throw the baby out with the bathwater when instead we should be much more nuanced in how we issue student loans in the future, and how we deal with those who have already borrowed.” 

There are pros and cons on both sides of this issue. Students shouldn’t still be repaying loans decades after graduating college. It’s unfair and those graduates have moved on in life but still have to pay for their loans. They shouldn’t exist because they are only helping temporarily.