This Washington Post article is written to evoke sympathy for recent graduates of colleges, universities, and professional schools who have taken on too much student debt. It’s also a fairly uncritical celebration of recent federal initiatives designed to alleviate these borrowers’ burdens.

Two missing points: First, many of these students took out exorbitant loans to finance long stretches of cushy academic living, and now they are desperate to avoid doing the hard work necessary to pay for that luxury. It’s not that they are averse to working hard, per se, only that they don’t want to do the (often boring) type of hard work that is sufficiently productive to pay a high enough salary to pay off their loans. Much better to leave that to the taxpayers. Which brings me to my second point: These loan-forgiveness programs will effectively subsidize young, idealistic, predominately left-leaning social activists who are convinced that their small paychecks indicate nothing more than society’s failure to fully appreciate their zeal to make the world a better place. Read the closing of the article:

The new loan programs might prove more useful to people who are “being squeezed out of socially valuable but lower-paying careers, like teaching and social work,” said Lindstrom, of U.S. PIRG.
Take Andrew Merki. The La Plata resident entered the University of Indiana two years ago to be a business major, “with some plan of making a good salary” upon graduation. Instead, he’ll graduate in 2011 with a newfound passion for public service — and $70,000 or $80,000 in debt. He’s volunteering at a Charles County shelter this summer and has launched a PIRG affiliate at his university.
“You have a vision in your mind to go out and change the world,” he said. “At the same time, there’s the harsh reality that you’ve got thousands and thousands in loans to repay. As much as you’d like the decision to be based on values and ideals, it comes down to money a lot of the time.”

Of course, this is not to say that many of these loan-forgiven students won’t do good and noble work. But the bottom line is that the federal government is encouraging students to incur massive debts to spend years lounging around on campuses that are hot beds of left-wing radicalism, and then forgiving these debts to allow these students to pursue their “values and ideals” at taxpayer expense. Never again will we have to worry about a shortage of community organizers.