Plans for debt relief on college student loans made headlines in the past two weeks, with some people praising it and others raising concern about costs.

Up to $10,000 in debt relief is available for any students trying to pay off loans, with up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients. It could make a valuable difference in terms of how soon recent graduates can start to invest, buy houses and work toward financial security.

A four-year degree costs far more than it did a generation ago. At the same time, it’s no longer seen as a dependable route to career success.

In some fields, it’s expected that four-year students will go on to graduate school. It can lead to a mountain of student debt even if they work while attaining their degree.

I was very fortunate back in the late 1980s since I had affordable state college tuition. Also I went to school in my hometown, lived at home at first before renting my downtown apartment for my junior and senior year.

I never had to worry about my next meal. All I had to do was show up at home on Marguerite Avenue and my parents would feed me.

If I saved money by eating beans and rice, macaroni and cheese, or free samples at the grocery store it was to save up for something I wanted rather than to make ends meet.

That wasn’t the case for some of my friends. They really didn’t have any extra money. They had to economize, needed to save by making it with less in terms of daily expenses.

The cost of college has mushroomed since those days, and it’s not because of salaries paid to professors. Tenured positions are hard to get. It’s not profitable to grant tenure to people, even if they perform in a way that truly makes them deserving of a permanent place on the faculty.

Instead it’s due mostly to overhead, to the cost of maintaining campuses and in some cases building new facilities. Many of the new projects center around sports, which is questionable since athletics is a dead end for almost every college participant. They honestly shouldn’t get ahead just because they can gain yards or shoot hoops.

For the vast majority of students, costs have gone well beyond the level of support provided by grants and scholarships. It puts recent graduates behind the eight ball in terms of debt.

It’s a serious issue. They can’t begin to think about savings or investments until they pay down their student loans.

We need a step in the right direction. We need to counteract all the negative aspects of high student debts that have taken shape over the past generation, all the barriers to financial well-being..

The only thing that makes me think we shouldn’t have debt relief is the students who’ve worked hard to pay off their debts in recent years.

Maybe we need to help them as well. Maybe everybody who had student loans and who still doesn’t have a net worth of $100,000 should get a $10,000 check also.

It’s hypocritical for people my age or older to want to deny student debt relief. We had the advantage of much more affordable college costs. It came with the forward-thinking mindset of the Greatest Generation, a special group of people who saw our society through the Great Depression and World War II.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was quoted in news reports as saying that today’s young people should just have to pay back their loans, however difficult it might be,

That shows how out of touch he and other like-minded conservatives are when it comes to the status of modern day young professionals and families. It would make the young generation debt-ridden, unlikely to ever have the standard of living of their parents.

There’s a need for affordable higher education. It’s almost a necessity in most professions. Knowing what I know now, I could break into journalism if I were a teenager. I couldn’t do it with what I knew at that point in my life. I needed my college years to set goals.

Everyone should have a good starting point in life. It’s our obligation to make it possible. The young generation is our future, and they deserve a full show of support.

— Jim Muchlinski is a longtime reporter and contributor to the Marshall Independent