You might argue that student-loan cancellation is having a moment because student debt is really bad. Simple as that. But the question of whether it is bad is actually pretty complicated. Lots of debt is not considered bad—for instance, most policy makers have no qualms with pushing as many people as possible to go hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt to pursue homeownership. Mortgages are the largest source of debt in the country and stood at roughly $10 trillion in September 2021. On its face, student-loan debt is the state financing the ability of millions of people (including this author, who is carrying more than $20,000 in outstanding federal-student-loan debt) to attend college, people who did not have the cash to pay up front and were loath to borrow from private lenders.

Certainly, total student debt has grown in size, shooting up from $948.2 billion in 2012 to $1.6 trillion in 2022. But so has the number of student-loan recipients, from 38.3 million in 2012 to 43.4 million in 2022. In that time, the average debt burden has gone from roughly $24,700 to $36,800. And that per-capita rise can be explained in part by the increasing numbers of student-loan recipients attending graduate school. (Graduate students borrow 37 percent of federal-student-loan dollars.)

The question of whether large amounts of student-loan debt are desirable depends on what recipients are buying in exchange for the debt. In 2020, the median weekly earnings for someone without a high-school diploma were $619; for those with some college but no degree, that number was $877; for those with a bachelor’s degree, $1,305. The number continues to grow for master’s recipients ($1,545), professional-degree recipients ($1,893), and doctoral recipients ($1,885).