A universal truth in economics is that if you subsidize something, you get more of it. If you tax something, you get less of it. The government uses this to go

A universal truth in economics is that if you subsidize something, you get more of it. If you tax something, you get less of it. The government uses this to good ends all the time. It's why we have very heavy taxes on gasoline and cigarettes: we want people to burn less gas and to smoke less. And we offer tax rebates for upgrading your house with better windows, and so forth. Forgiveness of student loans is just a subsidy of student loans. Subsidies give you more of it, which means that the more student loans we subsidize, the more student loans we'll have. Notice the exact words just above. I didn't say that if we subsidize student loans, we'll necessarily get more education, or that we'll get better educated people - because that's not what's being subsidized here! If we're subsidizing loans, we can expect people to take on more debt! But this doesn't necessarily lead to more actual education being done, because that's not what's being subsidized here. Of course, that doesn't prove the converse. It doesn't prove that education doesn't increase; just that we have no real reason to expect that it will.