Obviously, the guy or gal who never attended college and has no student debt doesn’t benefit.
This chart shows the majors connected with the largest student debt. (taken from an article at dailywire )
It’s fairly obvious that the folks who benefit from student loans being written off are the folks who attended school the longest. An attorney or physician has a lot more time to rack up student debt than the kid who attends school to be a cosmetologist or a welder.
You’ll note that in the field of law, the annual loan per person is about $32 thousand. In medicine, it’s only $17 grand per year – but that includes folks who enter the workforce with two year and four year degrees.
Excerpting three paragraphs from the Daily Wire article gives this view:
“In a recent year, the University of California-Los Angeles awarded 255 degrees in ethnic or gender studies. They graduated with an average of $40,000 in student loan debt, and earned about $26,000 the year after graduating.
At Winston-Salem State University, graduates of the communication and media studies major had some $30,000 in debt, and earned less than $19,000 in their first year out of school. Twenty to thirty-nine percent were in default on their loans three years later, according to federal data.
Meanwhile, one of the nation’s largest law schools, Georgetown University, granted 651 law degrees, graduating with more than $160,000 in debt. But they earned $166,000 in their very first year out of school — enough to pay it off entirely.”
The college experience has changed – the best example i heard was a department secretary who had seen the same apartment where she had lived with four other students 25 years later – a single student, her daughter’s boyfriend, was the sole occupant. As a faculty member, with an office that had started life as a dorm room, I watched “luxury dorms” constructed for new students. I recall a dean explaining how, with Pell grants available, raising the price of tuition and fees made no difference to the students.
This comment, found here shows the change:
“Over the last two decades, the number of managerial and professional staff that Yale employs has risen three times faster than the undergraduate student body, according to University financial reports. The group’s 44.7 percent expansion since 2003 has had detrimental effects on faculty, students and tuition, according to eight faculty members.
In 2003, when 5,307 undergraduate students studied on campus, the University employed 3,500 administrators and managers. In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on student enrollment, only 600 more students were living and studying at Yale, yet the number of administrators had risen by more than 1,500 — a nearly 45 percent hike. In 2018, The Chronicle of Higher Education found that Yale had the highest manager-to-student ratio of any Ivy League university, and the fifth highest in the nation among four-year private colleges.”
Another article at thefederalist describes the same situation:
As evidenced by the financial report from 2002-2003, Yale employed 3,500 administrators and managers while there were 5,307 undergraduate students enrolled at the university. Less than two decades later in 2019, before the pandemic affected enrollment, Yale employed more than 1,500 additional administrators while the undergraduate population had only risen by 600 students. Now undergraduate enrollment has dipped to 4,703, with more than 5,000 “managerial and professional staff.”
As a result of this seismic increase in administrators and managers, Yale has the highest manager-to-student ratio out of the Ivy League schools and the fifth-highest among four-year private nonprofits according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.”
The latin phrase cui bono describes identification of crime suspects by asking “who benefits?” I think we have the answer.
Trego's Mountain Ear 