Sometimes you gotta look past the headlines

Sometimes you gotta look past the headlines. When peering across college campuses these days you see two very different themes percolating near the top. One are the ever-increasing numbers of protests; and the other is the endless amount of student debt relief. And ongoing debate with respect to both.

It's the second topic that I'm most interested in this morning. For one, let me say my view is a.) colleges cost too much; b.) this hurts the national economy and experience because a lack of higher education "crowds out" lower income- and minority students; and c.) the biggest free riders on the U.S. tax system are billion-dollar endowments who don't kick in nearly enough to society relative to what they take from it.

All these Mike Creadon biases aside, I learned a few things by Googling the topic. My sense is this narrative is somehow underreported or even misreported. It goes without saying that since I spent about 4 minutes reading about the issue I'm now a world-leading authority on subject.

Two things stood out to me: first, forbearance is only for federal debt; not private loans. Second, relief is typically only eligible for those who have already paid into the loan program for 20-25 years. When you think about that for a moment, surely you'd assume that some or all of the principal was returned over those intervening decades and probably a fair amount of interest, too. The net effect might be something like lowering the borrowing amount or interest rate from 6.5% to, say, 1%. That's just a guess. But it's kinda crazy - at least to me - that this is represented strictly as a ploy to lure younger voters. Do you know any twentysometings who finished university around the turn of the centurty? I think that's probably when most of them were born.

C'mon. Everyone tell me I'm wrong. I'm fine with that. Go spend six minutes online reading about this story and come back to the group with your findings. I'm all ears on this topic.