Why The Next President Should Forgive Student Debt

With total college debt in the United States approaching 1.3 trillion dollars and average college debt at $35,000 in 2016, there is no question that our country has a flawed higher education program (Botstein). Amid the recent presidential election, candidates like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump proposed their own reforms for the world’s largest and most well-reputed education system, which were met with varying levels of opposition from the public. Several journalists and experts in the field have also proposed their own solutions to the problem, one of which is Leon Botstein in his TIME Magazine article, “Why the Next President Should Forgive All Student Loans”. Botstein lays out a bold proposal to forgive all student debt for students

However, while this proposal may be an immediate solution to the current problem, it fails to address the greater issues and problems of employability and rising tuition costs that currently exists. For these reasons, Botstein’s proposal is an effective short-term solution for our nation’s student debt crisis, but we must look for other solutions if we are to solve this problem for future

Botstein’s solution to forgive student loans for students that choose careers in the public service would require support from the federal government because those positions must be organized and made available to college graduates. To accommodate the vast number of college graduates, the government would need to create positions that outgoing college graduates could fill with their respective degrees and qualifications. This could be a potential problem as the number of public service careers are limited, and once the fields are saturated, graduates hoping to get subsidized loans may be not be left with any public service opportunities. Along with the support from government, this proposal would need cooperation from banks to fulfill the financial parts of the solution. For the government to forgive the student loans, it must have a strong relationship with financial institutions to make sure the process is taken care of seamlessly. This concern is mentioned in Botstein’s proposal as “an irresponsible and unaffordable bailout”, and to avoid plunging the American economy into turmoil, banks must create measures and programs to collaborate with the government’s interests in forgiving the student loans