Except we also have liberal arts majors who DID FIND meaningful work and still struggle. Teachers and others in education come to mind.
We should do more to increase low-income housing availability in certain areas, but that's largely a separate issue.
They made a bad bet and they’re going to pay the price for it. Being deceived on the expected outcome doesn’t automatically allow passing the financial responsibility to tax payers. If there’s actual fraud, let them sue the institutions.
Maybe they can find a new generation of liberal arts majors and continue the Ponzi scheme.
For example, we have the PSLF for borrowers who work in service careers. Maybe we don't need blanket loan forgives, but should simplify and beef-up PSLF.
And in parallel, we should be reforming the funding system for college so we don't have to keep addressing this problem.
PLSF is indeed a great example. It has well defined terms and people arguably know what they're getting into when they sign up for public service employment (with the intention to defer their loans).
I'm pretty strongly opposed to anything new though. The only thing I might get behind is a uniform policy that simply hands out cash to everybody regardless of incomes or loan status. If people have loans, don't even give them the cash, just pay off that slice of their loans. If there's no loans, they get the cash. No income games either. The only possible qualifications would be whether you're employed (which means the IRS already has a tax id).
If we're going to make all of us poorer through inflation by printing money, might as well distribute it fairly. At least in that situation the kid that went to trade school and doesn't have loan debt gets the cash.
Trade schools aren't free either. For example, WyoTech's 6-month welding program is $28,000. My local community college has a one-year welding program and per semester estimated cost of $10,000, so $20k total. You certainly shouldn't be able to run up $30k+ in loans on these programs, but people are definitely borrowing money to pay for them.
As for new programs, we should try to avoid the sunk-cost fallacy. What's better for society? Loan forgiveness or not? But, I definitely agree that we should avoid moral hazards by fixing the funding of higher ed as part of any package (otherwise we get to revisit the problem in another generation).
We do not want people to continue wasting their time in college. That itself is a huge drag on society. There needs to be some kind of 'punishment' to scare off future would-be students. "Oh, go on have your fun in your youth and we will all help you pay for it later" doesn't exactly send the right message.
PSLF isn't really loan forgiveness in the traditional sense. It is an employer providing compensation to workers for a quality that is deemed beneficial to the work being done. All employers are free to do this, and do so where such a benefit is recognized.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding how the program works... isn't it a federal program that forgives the loans of public sector and (some) non-profit workers after 10 years of employment and payments? To my knowledge, it's not funded by the various government agencies or non-profits, but by the federal government.