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While I may have sympathy for someone who has incurred large student debt, I simply cannot, and will not support the government bailing these people out with tax dollars, not even a single cent.

Yes, I went into the USN, got out and used the GI Bill, went to a state college for a STEM degree, lived at home with my parents while I commuted to school and held down jobs working a minimum of 20 hours a week (nursing home kitchen, even a UPS dockworker one year, and lab assistant) while working towards two degrees simultaneously.

My parents offered help, but it was clear to me they couldn’t afford it, so my living at home with free room and board was a huge help to me.

My point is, it was all by choice, every component of it, and I wasn’t very sharp, but I just made those choices as they came up. A lot of these people who are complaining I have no doubt are far more equipped than I was at their age to make the right choices. But they didn’t.

I feel sympathy for the graduates, and contempt for the colleges, but I refuse, on conservative principles, to allow that they should be bailed out with government money and rewarded for their conscious, and wrong choices, while those who made responsible choices have to suck up the fact that they paid more for their education than these people who wanted to go to a high end school and take useless courses.

I don’t care about predatory practices on the part of lenders. I managed to avoid signing up for credit cards while I was in college, even though they began to hand them out like popcorn with no credit checking. If you are 18 years old and are old enough to fight and die for your country, then you are old enough to put pen to paper in a legal contract. Nobody twisted your arm to do it, you did it yourself because you wanted to go to Harvard or Yale instead of Fitchburg State or Eastern Connecticut State University, live on campus, and enjoy that life. You signed it yourself if you were 18, or your parents co-signed for it, in which case they should be responsible.

This whole thing pisses me off, and if I had a kid who went through, worked, went to a lesser college for a STEM program, paid for everything and then saw some kid who went to Harvard for a Gender Studies degree get all their loans forgiven, I would be steaming mad.

As a first step, the government should be completely out of higher education. Anytime the government is involved, the costs go up, and are paid by taxpayers, not the institutions or professors themselves. Some may think as a recipient of the GI Bill, that it is hypocritical of me to take this stance, but I see no conflict. Anything we can do to assist veterans, given that we ask them to be prepared to lay down their lives or undergo great hardship, is worth the money and the right thing to do.