John Oliver on student loans: ‘It’s hard to feel like this system isn’t rigged’

John Oliver tackled the thorny issue of student loan debt on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, an issue plaguing over 43 million Americans – about 13% of the population – with a total outstanding debt of over $1.73tn, higher than the national GDP of Australia.

Joe Biden’s $400bn debt relief plan was struck down by the supreme court last year, in part because of outdated ideas on who owes money and how feasible student loans are. “For all the scorn heaped on people who took on student debt, it’s worth noting that this only got so big because of a lot of short-sighted policy choices over the years,” Oliver explained.

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The host dug into how we got here, starting with the student loan program itself, begun in 1958 by Eisenhower for students of math or science and expanded under subsequent presidents. “Some of these tweaks genuinely had the goal of making access to education easier,” Oliver said, “but the only thing they definitely made easier was ensuring that anyone going to college could now access an absolutely massive line of credit. And theoretically, that would’ve been manageable, so long as the price of college didn’t get out of hand.”

Yet it did – the average net cost of attending college for in-state students of public schools is now about $20,310 per year. That’s largely because following the 2008 financial crisis, the government slashed funding for public universities, which raised costs and tuition to make up the difference.

“We’re quietly privatizing public higher education throughout the country,” said F King Alexander, the former president of Louisiana State University. “The children in elementary school are not going to have a public, affordable option by the time they get out of high school.”

“It’s true,” Oliver noted, “and you can add that to the list of things that elementary schoolchildren aren’t going to have by the time they’re 18 – the list is now: affordable public college, summers below 100 degrees and their grandparents, probably.”

The rise in cost also owes to the need for public universities to recruit out-of-state students, who pay more, with excessive amenities, such as an LSU-shaped lazy river. “Whether out of necessity or greed, universities basically started turning their campuses into resorts to justify taking more money from students,” said Oliver. “And the thing is, even as tuition climbed, students didn’t stop applying. They just kept borrowing as much as they could.

“The mere existence of a student loan industry has ended up contributing to a vicious cycle of rising tuition and higher debt loads, all of which has made it very easy to take on debilitating amounts of debts, often at an age where you barely understand what you’re getting into,” he added.

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But it can seem like the only rational choice to many 18-year-olds, as a lack of college degree is a significant barrier to entry for many jobs. “Barriers to entry make sense for some things, like practicing medicine or gorilla enclosures,” said Oliver. “But requiring a degree for a job that can be done without one makes no sense at all.”

Though Fox News critics of debt relief often characterize forgiveness as subsidizing rich kids’ whims, Oliver noted that as of 2022, most student loan borrowers with outstanding debt owed less than $25,000, and that borrowers with the least debt often had more difficulty with repayment.

In sum, he argued: “This entire system seems practically set up to drown people in debt.”

That debt is made worse by student loan services, which manage loans on the government’s behalf. “In theory, they’re supposed to help you navigate the system,” said Oliver. “But in practice, they often manage to make things much worse” with long customer service wait times, incorrect billing and misleading information. Some payment plans have a 99% failure rate; a whistleblower for the company Navient said the company trained them to drop calls after seven minutes (the company denies this, but Oliver dropped their statement on air).

“When you take everything you see tonight together, it’s really hard to feel like this system isn’t rigged,” said Oliver. “We’ve set up a system where we created a barrier to entry for many jobs that can only be passed by taking on some of the most debilitating loans, with the least protections, administered by some of the shittiest companies on earth.”

Oliver advocated for Congress to pass student debt forgiveness, noting that “for all the populist speechifying that essentially boils down to ‘how dare you spend my money on something that benefits someone who is not me,’ the government spends money all the time on all sorts of things to benefit select individuals because we think there’s a net societal benefit, from forgiving loans to small businesses to subsidizing corn farmers to giving homeowners massive tax breaks to building stadiums. I don’t love spending money on all those things, but if you do, it feels pretty weird to suddenly draw a hard line at student debt.”

Though his comprehensive debt relief plan was struck down, the Biden administration has still managed to cancel $138bn in debt for nearly 4 million borrowers, a fact Oliver cheered.

Still, “we do need to tackle the cost of college, and for everyone’s good. I’m not saying that college is the right choice for everyone. But it should be a choice,” he concluded. “So it should be affordable for everyone regardless of what you study.”