[Jach]

So, where are the parents at?

I would bet it's a small minority of students who actually did seriously consult their parents and whose parents did wisely caution against it (even refusing to sign a parent PLUS loan, a factor not talked about much) but who found a private lender themselves anyway and after graduating can't pay it back. You could protect this minority from itself by raising the age of adulthood, but if we actually agree it's a minority, this won't solve the problem.

My point is it's not good enough to blame stupid non-adult teens when you could blame their adult parents just as easily, and trying to solve the problem at either of those levels (less stupid teens through 'education', or less stupid adults with longer reaching power, or forbidding teens in general from making bad choices) won't work.

[CoryG89]

The sad truth is that some kids don't have parents. The fact that they need to take out a loan at all suggests that their parents (if they have any) may not be very experienced at making much money themselves.

Loan forgiveness should not be restricted to teens. I know many adults that could be similarly mislead.

And absolutely it is a minority, which is why student loan forgiveness is workable. Trust me, the banks will still make money, just not as much.

[Jach]

Ok, so where are the teachers at? Surely they're in even better positions to advise than the average parent. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13070885 report suggests otherwise.

Some loan forgiveness is workable and I think inevitable but it does nothing to stop the problem, it just relieves some people at the expense of others (generalizing to the whole economy) who can take the hit. In that it's kind of a herring. When you find yourself in a hole, you should stop digging as the first thing you do. Loan forgiveness lifts some people out of the hole but incentivizes digging faster.

[CoryG89]

As some others have said, it all depends on how the debt is forgiven. If the government uses tax payer money to repay the loans, then you are correct. If the government makes universities and/or loan providers eat the cost in cases where it can be shown that they should have known the debt would not be able to be repaid, then the loan providers will not have an incentive to give out as many loans as possible to people who will be unable to repay them.

The party in the best position to know who will and won't be able to repay a particular loan is the lender, who has all the historical data and statistics about previous loans.