Student Loans

Why Is It so Damn Hard To Find Sympathetic Student Loan 'Victims'?

Less than half of the Class of 2024 took out college loans averaging $30,000—a manageable amount that buys over $1 million in extra lifetime earnings.

Nick Gillespie | 4.10.2026 10:47 AM

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Is any subgenre of journalism more debased and alienating than the student-loan sob story? If paying for college with heavily subsidized, federally backed loans was in fact the cause of the new, universal serfdom we hear so much about, you'd think that places like The New York Times would be able to scare up highly sympathetic young adults who tug at readers' heartstrings like orphans in a Dickens novel.

Instead, in stories like last week's "Student Debt Burdened Them, So They Moved Abroad and Stopped Paying," you get characters like 37-year-old Amanda Lynn Tully, who "graduated in 2017 with a master's degree in historic preservation from the University of Oregon, $65,000 in federal student loans and no job offers in the conservation field." Tully, reports the Times, "felt misled" and so "made a drastic decision: She moved to Prague, where she had........

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