The College Fix

With student loan debt set to exceed $1 trillion by the end of the year, many indebted college graduates hope the federal government will offer relief programs. But an Occupy Wall Street group is proposing a more radical solution: graduates should simply refuse to pay back their loans.

Members of the Occupy Student Debt Campaign–an OWS offshoot group consisting of students, faculty, and graduates in the New York area–began promoting their message at Zuccotti Park yesterday. They are asking everyone with outstanding student loan debt to pledge that they will stop repaying the debt once the pledge has a million participants.

Ashley Dawson, an English professor at City University of New York and one of the campaign’s organizers, stressed that the pledge was not legally enforceable.

“This isn’t a legally binding contract,” he said. “We aren’t going to hold anyone responsible in any way.”

The goal is to foster a sense of community among all those who suffer under the weight of unmet loan obligations, according to Dawson.

“We think that people really need to be empowered and not deal with these things individually,” he said.

Dawson knows that some people won’t have a very favorable view of those who accepted loan money and then refused to pay it back. But he blames the system, not those who participated in it.

“We really want to emphasize that we are not asking people to do anything immoral, it’s the whole system that’s immoral,” he said. “These loans were made at really extortionate rates, they never go away, and they were made by huge banks that have been paying their top executives multi-million dollar bonuses while people are drowning in debt.”

Some higher education experts expressed sympathy for graduates struggling to repay their loans, but condemned any national campaign aimed at throwing out debtors’ obligations.

“The worst thing that is happening in this country is the avoidance of responsibility at many levels,” said Jane Shaw, President of the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. “Forgiveness of debts would be another example of the many evasions of responsibility that are leading this country into a downward spiral. For debtors to announce that they are going to refuse to pay reveals complete ignorance of what a nation based on law is all about.”

Some students were disadvantaged by loan programs, but that doesn’t justify collective efforts to shirk loan repayments, she said.

“It is true that some of the graduates (or non-graduates) in Occupy Wall Street were lured into debt by universities, government promises, and their own immature hopes, so I sympathize with them to some extent,” she said. “But for most students the debt is manageable if they go out and work and earn some money.”

Others warned that encouraging borrowers to refuse repayments would have disastrous consequences, primarily for the borrowers themselves.

“This is really, really bad advice,” said Andrew Gillen, Research Director at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. “Most students will continue repaying their loans, which means that those heeding the call will be a minority of borrowers who deliberately stopped repaying. We have a recent analogy here—people who stopped paying their mortgages when they could afford it. They are not viewed kindly by the majority that continues to pay their mortgage.”

Gillen also said that the debt refusal campaign would turn public opinion against the protestors.

“Right now the protesters have sympathy because they took out loans and graduated into a terrible job market, leaving many of them incapable of repaying their loans for the moment,” he said. “But that sympathy will quickly vanish if instead of asking for temporary relief, they start demanding that their loans be repaid by those who have struggled for years to pay off their own student loans.”

Of course, the debt refusal pledge is just one of the goals of the Occupy Student Debt Campaign. The group also wants the federal government to cover all tuition costs at public universities. Private universities should be more transparent about their finances.

The campaign is also seeking the complete abolition of all current student loan debt. That’s only fair, said Hilary Goodfriend, an organizer of the campaign.

“Debts are written off for banks and corporations and entire nations all the time,” she said. “Huge segments of our society are struggling with these incredibly unjust debt burdens. Surely they, if anyone, are worthy of a write-off like that.”

But Gillen doesn’t think two wrongs make a right.

“My response would be: stop bailing out everyone else too,” he said.

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