But that’s because I don’t like to blame people for falling for a lie:

…while some people say these 18-year-old kids don’t know what they’re getting themselves into, let’s not pretend we don’t know better. I distinctly remember asking my friend how he would pay off the roughly $70,000 debt he would incur to obtain a major in Ancient Greek and Latin at a liberal arts college in the Midwest. His answer? A simple shrug and flippant “It’s not something I have to worry about right now — hopefully they’ll be forgiven by the government.” Now that he’s still waiting tables four years after graduation, I’d say it’s well past time to start worrying.

Bolding mine: contra the article (which is otherwise fine, if a touch schadenfreude-y) there’s a reason why college students perennially think that their insane student loan debts are going to be forgiven.  It’s because the Democrats campaign on the subject.  Note: ‘campaign.’  They don’t ever actually do anything about it, because any meaningful way of doing so* would tick off the universities, which are frankly more reliable long-term allies of the Democrats and thus highly valuable to that party.  Your average 18 year old college freshman, on the other hand?  Well, there’s an excellent chance that within ten years he or she will be voting Republican; the ROI on helping out that class of person is thus downright awful. But Democrats can’t just come out and say that, because in the short term the Democrats need the votes.  So… the dance goes on.

And, honestly, ‘these 18-year-old kids don’t know what they’re getting themselves into.’ Hence my (student-loan free**) rough sympathies.  Mind you, the answer to this would be: start voting Republican.  And start telling your new legislators that you’d really like to see them put the screws to the university and the student loan industries…

Via Instapundit.

(Image via Shutterstock)

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Short version: make student loans dischargeable via bankruptcy and put the schools at least partially on the hook for any bad loans that they helped facilitate.  That won’t fix the entire problem, but it’d really really really help.

**I ended up with mild – in retrospect; at the time it felt crushing – student loan debt because of grad school. But we paid that off a decade ago. Of course, it helped that my wife got a PhD without actually incurring any debt at all***.

***Darned straight I married up.