EDITORS' CORNER
OPINION: Does the media secretly oppose student loan bailouts?
One has to wonder if the mainstream media is secretly opposed to bailing out student loan borrowers, as readers are rarely treated to a good victim.
Reason editor-at-large Nick Gillespie recently pointed out something I have noticed before: the sob stories pumped out by the media about student loan borrowers are often not convincing and in fact make them look bad.
He commented on a New York Times story about a borrower with $65,000 in debt from a “historic preservation” graduate degree, who subsequently fled to Prague to avoid making payments.
“She was paying $60 per month when she defaulted,” the New York Times reported. “This amount, to many, may seem manageable. But for her, it remained psychologically burdensome.”
As Gillespie commented, the newspaper and the borrower “loses virtually all readers—and taxpayers,” with this chronicle.
“It shouldn’t be at all controversial or odd to insist that beneficiaries of a program pay for all or most of the benefit, especially when all data suggest that they can do so without anything approaching serious hardship,” he concluded, after sharing statistics on increased lifetime earnings of college graduates.
Indeed, few of the chosen “hardship” stories by the media amount to sympathetic cases, as regularly covered here at The College Fix.
There’s Parvanae Abdi, a teacher who had $200 monthly student loan payments, but quit her job and then griped to NBC News about not being able to pay the bills. She is one of the borrowers profiled in 2023 about the “terrifying” effects of student loan repayments restarting after a three-year freeze.
The same news outlet told its readers about Patrick Donohue, who quit his 20-year career with AT&T along with his wife, a dental assistant. The 67-year-old took out loans for his kids and “still works part-time to bring in extra income.”
He is doing so not just to pay for the loans but to “protect his inheritance” from his parents.
The article did mention that another borrower, who has $1 million in student loan debt with his wife, survived cancer. Though notably, the wife has a law school degree and her husband, the cancer survivor, went back to law school to get a degree after beating cancer.
In 2022, Business Insider also profiled Juan Sorto, who wanted to be a probation officer. Nothing wrong with that. But somehow he ended up in a doctoral program in urban policy and owes $250,000 in student loan debt.
The outlet reports that Sorto ignored his mother who told him to go to trade school instead.
His mom “did not have an understanding of how much of a difference having a college degree would be to our livelihood,” Sorto told the news outlet. Always listen to mom!
But one reason it might be hard to find good cases of beleaguered people is that the same type of behavior that leads to excessive student loan debt is reflective of deeper decision-making problems.
Consider that a study by the University of Chicago found the student loan pause led people to taking on more personal debt, as The Fix reported in 2023.
The trio of researchers found “borrowers used the new liquidity to increase borrowing on credit cards, mortgages, and auto loans rather than avoid delinquencies.”
Mortgages and auto loans are at least defensible uses of taking on debt.
In 2022, a survey by Intelligent.com found that potential recipients of Biden’s student loan bailout planned to use the extra money on “vacations, smartphone, [and] drugs/alcohol.”
Gambling, gaming, and gifts were three other areas of interest, along with investments and a wedding.
We can certainly feel sympathetic for someone who took on a lot of debt and ran into a serious hardship, like a lifelong disability. This is one reason that allowing student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy could be a positive step, as someone would have to convince a judge they could not afford the payments.
But I have some advice for applicants looking to gain sympathy with a bankruptcy court – make sure to show you are spending money on utilities, rent, and kids’ clothing, not on drugs and alcohol.
MORE: Most workers pay back student loans on time, study finds
