Who? All those "students" who took out loans for what turned out to be mostly a four to six year party and a worthless credential.
The first lie has been a long term, systemic practice of grade inflation casually laughed off as the Lake Wobegone effect. It is particularly frightening that this is most prevalent in math. Parents should know more and demand better.
The lie affecting society as a whole is the myth that a college education is necessary and implicitly sufficient for someone to make a whole lot more money than they would otherwise. And yet what we have now are stories of folks carrying $44K (or more) who struggle to pay $138/month to nibble away at the debt. Why? Because this borrower had a job making $28/hour ($56K/yr), got laid off and found a new job making $18.50/hour ($37K/yr). Not exactly the pot of gold they were told was at the end of the college debt rainbow.
And these two lies are not disjoint. Throughout high school students are being told they are much better educated than they are, particularly in math. This innumeracy manifests itself in students, told they are college material, who cannot fire up a spreadsheet or an online calculator and find out whether that mountain of debt can be bought off by the mirage of a pot of gold. Forget the spreadsheet, back-of-the-envelope ciphering shows that it would take almost 27 years to retire that debt at zero percent (0%) interest. At a measly 3% interest rate this payment would take almost 53 years to retire the debt at a total cost (principal and interest) of almost $88K. This debtor would be on track to pay as much in interest as they borrowed in the first place. Should they live so long.
Yes, they were lied to. Yet, they, college material, made a choice and now they want that choice, a bad one, to have no consequences, at least for themselves. If they are to get debt amnesty a couple of things must happen first: they must explain to those who've paid their loan or never had one exactly why these debtors get off the hook; and the CFPB must realign towards preventing bad loans rather than facilitating them.
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