Student Loan Crisis Explained
How has it gotten this bad?
As millions of young Americans continue to beg President Biden for more student loan forgiveness, the question arises: How did it get this bad?
Legislation was passed decades ago to allow even the most underprivileged Americans a chance at go to college and work their way into a middle class. Now young adults are granted tens of thousands of dollars to pursue college degrees that may or may not pay off in the long run and countless Americans just can’t pay the debt off.
In a recent discussion With Yahoo News, Josh Mitchell, author of The Debt Trap: How Student Loans Became a National Catastrophe, said, “If you just keep on issuing student debt in the same fashion, which is basically giving families a blank check, you’re just going to have more and more families end up in unrepayable debt over the years, and it doesn’t really solve the underlying issue.”
Mitchell added, “Congress was very reluctant to cut off anyone’s access to college. And it just became the path of least resistance to give people loans. It became very easy to ignore the fact that a lot of people were defaulting on their loans and a lot of people lied to themselves about the fact that people would repay this debt.“
Mitchell insisted that Congress “just applied rose-colored glasses to this program throughout the years and said: ‘Look, we need to give our constituents access to student loans,’ and individual lawmakers were resistant to reducing “access to this golden ticket to the middle class.”
Currently, $1.7 trillion is still needed to pay back in student loans nationally and that number is only growing.
Biden is being pressed by Democrats to use executive action and forgive massive amounts of debt.
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