With college debt forgiveness, some deserve the help more than others

Sometimes one decision can change the trajectory of your future, such as deciding which college to attend.

Mark White is Editor of The News Journal.

During my senior year of high school, I was all set to go to the University of Kentucky. I had the student aid documents all filled out. I had a housing assignment for the fall and my roommate was a buddy of mine, Jerry Byers, who had graduated high school one year ahead of me.

Like many high school students, I was clueless and didn’t really have any idea how much tuition was going to be. I just planned to get student loans and pay them off after I graduated like pretty much everyone else I knew.

When I was in high school you got one excused absence for taking a college tour. I hadn’t used mine and during the spring of my senior year of high school, another buddy of mine, Billy Dunford, talked me into going with him to tour Cumberland College, which is where he was thinking about going to college.

Figuring there was no point in wasting a good excused absence, I agreed to go but had no plans whatsoever to attend Cumberland College.

Billy and I got down there and toured the school all morning, then talked with the admission’s person, who told me that based upon my high school GPA and ACT score that I could probably qualify for an academic scholarship if I went there.

I immediately became interested in going to Cumberland College at that point. I filled out all the paperwork and so forth and a couple of weeks later I drove down there for an interview with an administrator about an academic scholarship. Apparently I didn’t blow the interview because she offered me a $2,700 per year academic scholarship. No one had ever given me anything close to $2,700 so I was like “Wow!”

The bottom line ended up being that between the scholarship and student aid, I could get through my freshman year with no student loan debt whatsoever, if I commuted to school.

By commuting, I got through my first year at Cumberland debt free, and my second year with only a $750 student loan.

That fall I transferred to Eastern Kentucky University, where I commuted to classes two and sometimes three days a week on the main campus, and took a couple of night classes at the local extension office.

Between student aid and what I made working at a local radio station part-time, I ended up with only $750 in student loan debt for two and one-half years of college.

Were they the best two and one-half years of my life? Nope. I can’t say that they were real fun like the fun you would have living on campus and having the full college experience, but getting that much education for that little debt made up for it.

I moved onto campus and into the dorm for my final one and one-half years of college at EKU, which was a fantastic time. Yeah, I accumulated about $4,000 in additional debt that I had to pay back, but it was better than massive student loans that some of my friends graduated college with.

Recently, President Joe Biden issued an executive order forgiving between $10,000 and $20,000 worth of student debt for many people that still owe school loans.

I don’t begrudge some of them getting that debt forgiven, such as some folks, who come from an impoverished background that are going into a relatively low paying profession, such as teaching, because they want to give back to their communities.

Then you have some others, who spend four and sometimes five or six years on the party plan at college, then get a largely useless degree. I just can’t feel sorry for those folks.

Personally, I think questions to get student loan debt forgiveness should be what, if anything, did the applicant do to reduce the amount of debt they accumulated in college?

Did they go to community college for two years where the tuition rate is lower? Did they work while they went to school?

For many people, there are things you can do to lower the cost of college, and I think the folks who did some of those things and still accumulated lots of college debt should be the ones who get student loan debt forgiveness.