Many NJ residents await ruling on student loan forgiveness

This past Tuesday the Supreme Court started hearing arguments on whether or not President Biden's student loans forgiveness plan was constitutional.

Read more: The Supreme Court takes up student loan forgiveness — What’s at stake?

We asked our listeners to weigh in to get a feel of how people in New Jersey feel about it considering we are a state with a high percentage of college graduates. The majority of callers were against it but a few made a good case for loan forgiveness.

One such caller was a young woman in her early 30s who was quite polite and pragmatic in her argument. She said when she was 17 years old and about to graduate high school, her parents, her counselors and all of her friends were focused on where she was going to college and what she would study.

So at 17 with the help of her parents she took out loans to be able to afford a "good school."

She had no idea that 15 years later after many payments she wouldn't even be close to paying off.

She had no idea she would marry a man in the same position and that their combined bill together every month for student debt would be over $600!

Having gone through it with my three kids, I know the pressure is intense and the message is singular. "You have to get a college degree to be anything in this world today."

Only one of my kids went to a four-year school and borrowed money. He commuted, no room and board. My agreement with him was that I would pay the bill until he got a solid "career" job and then he would take over. I was very much against sending them far away and spending a fortune on what in many cases is a worthless piece of paper.

The young lady who called made me think that it was NOT her fault. We should blame her parents, her counselors and especially the colleges that make it more expensive lengthy to graduate to make more MONEY.

If anyone wants to forgive these loans it shouldn't come from the taxpayers. Many of those same taxpayers already paid off their loans or went to smaller schools to avoid higher costs or went into a trade and paid for their education as they worked.

It's heinously unfair to those people to make them pay for other people's loans.

Finally, many big companies are dropping the college degree requirement.

A lot of these loans were taken out by naive 17-year-olds who had no idea what they were getting lured into this horrible indentured servitude on behalf of the lending institutions and colleges.

Yeah, give these graduates some sort of break but not at the expense of the taxpayers — again!

Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Dennis Malloy only.

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