> Moreover, the amount of resources available is also a choice. We could raise taxes.

yes, we can apportion resources from one area of society for another. this doesn't create new resources: it moves them. instead of me donating 5% of my paycheck to my favored cause, that spending power is erased by the resources which were redirected to another cause (this is the point of me sharing that personal example earlier).

> The only effective difference between student loan forgiveness and student loan discharge in bankruptcy is that in the latter case, you're making life more difficult for the debtor.

not all whose debt was forgiven in this act were in default or incapable of repaying. otherwise, agreed.

> There's not much evidence that what students learn in the classroom at Harvard is significantly different than what they learn at any other school. Math is math, science is science, literature is literature, etc. The point is to go to Harvard, to be at Harvard, and to have Harvard on your résumé. It's mostly social. The exclusivity is the point.

what's constructive about subsidizing an exclusive-by-design system? i don't want to subsidize anything which is fixed-sum. subsidized schooling makes sense to the degree that the subsidy enriches society (loaded term but e.g. more freedom/ability to pursue the things which enrich a life and the lives around you). university as job training is the crude/direct way this happens; learning skills/knowledge relevant to any participation in society achieves this (e.g. communication, collaboration, organization skills); acquiring wisdom does this, in a cloudy manner difficult to measure. making social connections can do this, but if exclusivity is important to that then subsidies can't improve that, and if exclusivity is unimportant then we have loads of cheaper ways in which to congregate and make these connections. my state already offers effectively free community college: i assumed the depth/breadth of the curriculum were insufficient compared to more expensive universities, but if this turned out to be either false or irrelevant then i would claim that existing subsidies to higher-ed are already sufficient (at least in my state; i don't know about the rest of the country).

> My feeling is that making higher-ed free to future students in perpetuity is the much more expensive proposition than forgiving some debt to former students, so if there's enough money for the former, it's unclear why there's not enough for the latter.

without doing the former, the latter has to be done every 4 years (and if forgiving loans today causes future students to take on greater amounts of unrepayable loans, then this gets more expensive every time we do it). it's the "why not both" question again: if we had the resources for both, sure (or, refining this after earlier points of discussion, "if we could do both for a reasonable cost"). if we don't, then it's a question of what proportion we allocate toward improving the long future v.s. patching the narrow present. i simply put more value on an expenditure which can benefit N*M future students v.s. one which benefits only M present (or past) individuals at an equivalent cost. especially if improving things for the M present individuals has a real risk of making the situation worse for N*M future students.