Right now Congress makes it illegal to actually extinguish these loans due to bankruptcy

Not all students really should go on to college

Williams: Right-if he did $10,000 per borrower, that would extinguish 15 million borrowers, and that would go a long way. It wouldn’t actually address what the progressives want, in particular Elizabeth Warren. However, I think it would go a long way. It’s $400 billion; I mean, this is not small change.

Most: We’d probably be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge that here we are talking at Boston University, which is a school that is not inexpensive to attend. Can you just talk briefly about how we got here in the first place and is there a way out?

Williams: Sure. Well, I think we got here in part because since the 1980s, tuition has increased eightfold relative to wages. So in a sense, students that were going to a state school or even a private school leading up to the 1980s, you could have a summer job, you could save, and tuition was much more reasonable than it is now.

So debt became a bigger issue. We also had cuts as a result of the oil embargo of 1979, federal cuts that started in California and swept the nation, which reduce the amount of state funding that was received. Read more