Addison Del Mastro’s essay, Could You Loan Some Forgiveness?, is the best I’ve read on the subject to date.  An excerpt:

It’s the human cost of these loans, and the aura of fraud about them—the fact that they can’t be discharged via bankruptcy, the fact that parents might have urged their college-bound children to take them, the fact that colleges sold them with promises of employment and high salaries—that pushes me in favor of forgiveness. Many of these loans should never have been offered, many degree programs are oversold, and many students did not, and reasonably could not have, taken them with a clear-eyed understanding of what it would mean for them five, ten, or twenty years down the road.

Yes, some people made bad decisions. But there’s a limit to how much you can blame them, and to how severely they should be punished, for being starry-eyed 18-year-olds who believed what their parents and guidance counselors and prospective colleges told them. “Buyer beware” might work for used cars, but colleges, which trade on the notion that they have a higher, public-minded purpose, should be held to a higher standard.

I can remember being 18, and I knew next to nothing about paying for college. Actually, when I was 18, I wanted to take a gap year and try living on the street and getting rich by working on free coffee-shop WiFi. I think of myself trying to get out of studying for the SAT, instead asking why a private company was allowed to control college admissions. I remember thinking about whether a college we were planning to tour would have an ice cream machine in the dining hall.

I knew nothing. My parents helped me a lot, both in terms of paying for much of my college and in finding out information. I think of classmates whose parents didn’t have the money or the wherewithal to help them as much, or whose parents might have steered them towards financially risky choices. I think of one classmate in particular who had loans, who couldn’t afford to live on campus, and who actually supported her parents with money from her campus job. I did extremely well in college, I went on to earn a master’s degree and a substantial grad-school scholarship, and I make money today doing what I love. But there’s no way in hell I was prepared to make a financial decision at the age of 18 that dogs many people as much as or more than a mortgage.