[bespoke_engnr]

I respect your comment, and your viewpoint. But I often hear versions of this: "I had it hard, so we shouldn't let these soft youngsters get off any easier."

I'm not saying you don't have a point (college education has a cost), but on some level it's really just an argument for never making anything better.

I prefer to think, "Are we really so backwards and impoverished as a society that we don't even have the resources to educate our citizens?"

[Macross8299]

>"I had it hard, so we shouldn't let these soft youngsters get off any easier."

No, they are presumably angry because they are still paying for being responsible enough to pay off their debt in the form of opportunity cost. If they paid 100k off in debt in the past, that's money they don't have now to invest or spend.

Also, having taxes imposed on you for something you didn't get to benefit from at all (but easily could've) is pretty angering.

[bespoke_engnr]

Yeah, I totally get the sentiment. It's absolutely valid and reasonable. But at some point we have to get to a place where newcomers to the system start getting a 'better deal' then the people came before them.

That's good news! That means the system is improving!

[jazzyk]

I know at least a few upper-middle class families whose children went to get some easy, "artsy" degrees at $70K/year.

The parents had their children take on student loans, and bought themselves BMWs at the same time.

Now these kids graduated, are (predictably) struggling to make ends meet, and they may not be able to pay back their student loans.

Should the loans be forgiven in these case, as well? Who decides when and when not?

Also, the loan money did not only go to pay for tuition - I saw students doing homework on their top-of-the-line MacBooks sipping their $4 lattes all day long. Expensive vacations in some cases, too.

[gr__or]

I don't think this slippery slope style reasoning captures interesting disagreement. Imo we should look at the majority of cases and not get lost in edge cases. Which category does what you describe fall into? My intuition says the latter.