this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2025
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Student loan forgiveness is regressive. College graduates earn well over $600,000 more in lifetime income than others on average, a figure far beyond the amount of student debt they are in (median is around $20-25,000).
Given this fact, paying those loans off at the expense of (primarily) those who didn't go to college is a redistribution of wealth from a poorer to a richer demographic, regressive by definition.
Though forget lifetime, the difference in income is sizable right out of the gate:
It's only regressive if the tax that funds the student loan forgiveness is regressive. If we have a progressive tax system - which we do, for the most part (excepting the ultra rich who are able to dodge taxes without consequence) - then it is not a redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich, but at worst a horizontal wealth redistribution and at best a wealth redistribution from the rich to the poor. Whoever gave you this idea lied to you and/or was lied to.
If you split the population into two demographics, those who have student loan debt and those who don't, the former category is objectively wealthier on average, over their lifetime.
Therefore, forgiving student loan debt is by definition regressive. You cannot have poorer people's money going to richer people and say it's not regressive. The ones with student debt are statistically already going to end up with a lot more money than those who don't, without the extra handout paid for by all of the other taxpayers.
So why should they be getting even more, out of the pockets of poorer people, exactly?
By this logic all public services are regressive, since everyone pays into them and there will always be someone poorer who pays in and someone wealthier who benefits. That's why progressive tax rates exist, so that the amount of tax people pay is proportional to how much they are able to contribute. Our progressive tax system only breaks down at the upper levels with the obscenely wealthy. Despite this - on average - the poor benefit the most from student loan forgiveness and the (relatively) rich contribute the most. This is because even though the rich and poor alike would have their student debt forgiven, the rich would be paying more tax to make up for it. It's really a very simple concept, and should not be so difficult for you to understand.
Now, as an extra note, if we corrected our progressive tax system to tax the obscenely wealthy at the highest possible rate (as a progressive tax system is supposed to - and used to - do), there would be absolutely no question as to where the wealth is being distributed, because the wealthiest people who currently pay little to no tax hold more wealth than the rest of us combined.
This is not a valid analogy, unless those public services went only to the wealthiest people. Student loan forgiveness goes only to college students (obviously), who are statistically the wealthiest among us, over their lifetimes.
It's like if there was a financial government benefit/incentive to buying a second house. Only the wealthiest among us are buying more than one house, so that would be an obviously-regressive policy.
The same money that would forgive the loans of college students, instead being used as grants for people who, for financial reasons, never went to college, would be put to much better use.
No. It is if you tax everyone the same. You don't have to, and you shouldn't.
Any taxes paid by student debt holders that is used to forgive said debt is a wash, that money's going in a circle. Every taxpayer without student debt, however, takes a loss when taxes are used to forgive those debts.
It doesn't matter how much or how little the actual amount of taxation per person is. The fact is, this is literally 'tax cuts for the rich' on a smaller scale, as those with the student debts are statistically much wealthier than the rest of the population, without taxpayer-funded student loan forgiveness widening the gap.
So to get this straight:
You are against making studying more accessable for less wealthy people because that would mean taxing the general public and that is a wealth transfer from poor to rich?
You understand that it would allow poor people to study and consequently make it less relevant how wealthy you are to be able to study. Resulting in much more a merit based system than wealth based system.
You understand that by giving more people access to completing a university degree, you get more people with university degree. So e.g. more doctors, more doctors cheaper prices.
And of course, you can make the tax based on whether or not you have an university degree. Now you could call it a wash but obvious it would a display of great ignorance about the practical options that exists. In such a system, you don't need a loan, so you don't need to pay interest, you don't need someone who is willing to grant you the loan, temporary unemployment would be less of an issue...
And these are the reasons why poor people don't study.
For the wealthiest people*
The point is that if you're a college student, you're already in the richest category statistically; you literally are less in need than everyone else, on average. The same money would be much better suited to give grants to people who have, for financial reasons, never set foot in college to begin with.
Having student loans is no obstacle to completing a degree, this is non-sequitur. No one is expected to pay student loans off pre-graduation.
You've done quite a poor job of 'getting this straight', I have to say—quite a crop of straw men you've assembled.
If you don't have to pay for university as there is no loan to be paid back, the people who can't go for financial reasons can step their foot into university.
Student loans in the US are a problem because they are a bad deal.
If they were replaced with a more generous interest rate (eg somewhere equivalent to break even for government debt, maybe higher to compensate for low earners, but nothing like the profit making rates used), and only applied progressively (which as you point out, will be generally fine since graduates should earn plenty on average), then maybe nobody would be pushing for forgiveness.
But US student loan debt is privatised, so the government can’t easily improve the terms, thus everyone reaches for the hammer of paying it off.
I've read arguments that those figures are misleading because various forms of privilege are correlated with a college education the other way around; connections that could help you get a job, baseline cognitive aptitude, cultural fit with a high paid workplace, having the resources to be free to socialize and network rather than working a job on top of schoolwork etc. There is likely a large group of people who go to college and end up getting little to no benefit in terms of income potential.
You also can't fairly compare average income against median debt, because the outliers at the top I believe will pull the average higher than the median in both cases.
There's also how a higher income does not necessarily mean you are better off, and people who are in debt are obligated to have a higher income rather than reducing their expenses, so the debt itself is a cause of making more. Someone working multiple mentally/physically draining jobs at the expense of their non-work life will have a higher lifetime income, but that might be a situation they wish they were not in, and debt obligations will prevent them from downsizing their lifestyle.
You can say the same thing about child tax credits with no means testing. The idea is that it benefits society in general for people to have kids, so we subsidize it. Same with higher education.
The real crime of th student loan system though, is that the interest rates are ridiculous. I would be happy if the taxpayers just subsidized it to the extent that the loans were zero interest. Though obviously it would be far better to just guarantee free higher education instead of a convoluted system of loans.
No, you can't, because the 'has a child' demographic is not wealthier on average than the demographic who is childless—the literal opposite is true. If there was a 'no child tax credit', I would be against it for the exact same reason I'm against college student loan forgiveness.
No, this is not a valid analogy.
If you're already in college, you don't need a government handout to complete your education and in turn bring that value to society. It would be orders of magnitude more valuable for that same money, for example, to be used to get people into college who, for purely financial reasons, never went at all.
Student loan forgiveness does not increase the number of college graduates, as having student loan debt is in no way an obstacle to completing your degree. Your analogy would only work if we were talking about an incentive given to people who never began a college education.
That doesn't require subsidy, since if you think about it, interest is essentially a 'fee' for borrowing the $X, and not part of what was originally borrowed. Having governmental student loans be interest-free is an idea I can get behind, for the reason you mentioned, subsidizing things that are 'profitable' to society in the long run.
Now, maybe I just didn't realize, but if there is a loan forgiveness 'policy' being put forth that defines the forgiveness as 'we'll treat everything you've paid toward the loan over its lifetime as if it was all toward principal' (basically 'pretending' it was 0% interest all along), and then from there, reducing the actual principal by that amount, and considering the loan paid off if that would bring it to zero, then I'm in favor of that. At worst, that results in the government getting 'less extra' money from the students who borrowed, without making anyone owe less than what they originally borrowed. And then going forward, have them be interest-free, so we don't have to go back and do this again in X years.
That sounds fine to me. But if extra money is going out, it should be going to those who need it the most. Either that, or 'universal' stuff that goes to everyone in cases where the cost of means-testing is literally more expensive than it would be to just give it to everyone.