I feel like allowing bankruptcy in certain situations would make sense.
For example, I took out undergraduate and graduate loans to train for a career that, due to a freak health event (I got MS) in my last semester of grad school, I couldn't actually do. Currently, the disability discharge works in a way where if you can do any work at all you're on the hook for the full amount.
So someone who went to school to become an actuary/doctor/lawyer/etc, suffered a severe head injury and afterwards can only work a retail or fast food job is still on the hook for all their loans and has to pay them off on poverty wages.
Another case is people for whom the economic landscape changed so drastically so quickly that the decisions they made when entering school might not be relevant when they leave school. Think people who started undergrad in 2005/2006/2007 - they might have made perfectly reasonable decisions about what college to go to and how much debt to take out based on expected future return, and then that return tanked while they were in school + there were several years of scraping by during which interest accumulated due to no fault of their own.
Think of people who started a Computer Science degree in 2019 or 2020 (yes, individuals can maximize their chances of getting a software development job after university, but as a collective many of them will have to do something else for the foreseeable future).
Yeah, I'd consider the COVID kids to be in a similar boat to those of us who were in college for the GFC. The only reason interest rates were raised as suddenly and drastically as they were is because of COVID, which is a freak event. (Albeit one we should have been planning for as a country.)
There are ways to get student loans discharged in bankruptcy now, and one of the criteria that can be used is essentially that you were sold a bait and switch. (e.g. if the school majorly misrepresented what graduates from certain majors earned) I'd argue that there are cohorts who had that happen on essentially a societal scale, and we should modify the existing legal principle to include deception by the government/industry and not just by educational institutions.
I also think there might be societal stability benefits to this - one of the biggest black pills I've ever encountered was that in the GFC, people could lose their houses/go bankrupt and be allowed to start over even if they took out a NINJA mortgage, that the mortgage brokers/sellers individually saw no punishment, and almost all the high up people who caused/exacerbated the issues got off scot free or were eligible for new starts. If an adult in their 30s-50s makes a bad choice, we have to bail them out or help or not hold them accountable? But the kids who made bad decisions at 17 should be held to them for life? It was just a clear case of shitting on people without the power to push back that it made me revile a lot of American 'values'.
For example, I took out undergraduate and graduate loans to train for a career that, due to a freak health event (I got MS) in my last semester of grad school, I couldn't actually do. Currently, the disability discharge works in a way where if you can do any work at all you're on the hook for the full amount.
So someone who went to school to become an actuary/doctor/lawyer/etc, suffered a severe head injury and afterwards can only work a retail or fast food job is still on the hook for all their loans and has to pay them off on poverty wages.
Another case is people for whom the economic landscape changed so drastically so quickly that the decisions they made when entering school might not be relevant when they leave school. Think people who started undergrad in 2005/2006/2007 - they might have made perfectly reasonable decisions about what college to go to and how much debt to take out based on expected future return, and then that return tanked while they were in school + there were several years of scraping by during which interest accumulated due to no fault of their own.