I look at it more as an investment in our citizens . If you don't keep your grades up or fail out you should have to pay it back, but if you graduate and start your life, pay taxes etc the loans should be forgiven. The country would eventually get their investment back via taxes. They could implement this and some type of oversight to reign in the university costs. Easier to control indebted people though so it wont happen.
That would make sense as a program, though it might incentivize some strange Cobra-Effect type behaviour among both institutions and students. The problem is that the backwards-looking forgiveness/giveaway programs do not incentivize people to work hard or select degrees they can complete.
Practically, this makes no sense though. Those that do not complete school are the ones that will have the hardest time paying back their loans. You are just burying people further in their own failures.
Young people make mistakes. It does not benefit society to make those mistakes ruin their lives.
I think one difference is that for most investments, you get some say in what you invest in.
For public schools, you have school districts. For infrastructure you have utility districts. For libraries and parks and amenities, you have municipal government.
For student loans, though, the individual students are the ones making the decisions. The taxpayer is subsidizing students pursuing highly employable careers like engineering or medical science, but is equally subsidizing students pursuing unemployable degrees like cultural studies or literature.
And to be clear, these areas do have value, but it also seems reasonable for taxpayers to call out the fact that these are terrible ROI investments, money-wise.
