As I said, it would be more reasonable to give everyone a credit, not forgive debt.
I think the more reasonable thing would be to forgive debt AND find a solution to making sure nobody else has to suffer from crushing debt for education. Make community college free, heavily subsidize people who go to public colleges, etc.
I am actually sympathetic to the fact that social pressure or other structural dynamics may encourage people to make bad choices, but they were not “forced”.
How does “society” force someone to get an expensive degree?
It is always a choice
Your position is common among "personal responsibility" absolutists, which, like most absolutism, doesn't really work.
1. Absolutely 2. What’s this about a job making you happy?
> But speaking realistically, society forces people to do many things without using direct physicality or threats.
I don’t get this line of thinking. I can come up with compulsory taxation, but you can always move to another society. What has society forced you to do?
1. Nature forces you to eat and have shelter. There's no discussing it.
2. Society does not give you free food or shelter or land to farm and tools to do it, nor means of transportation. (When it does, it's either conditional, or insufficient numbers, or both.)
3. By this you're forced to enter job market to keep alive, which forces you to enter into specific education path.
4. Even where education is free, point 2 holds. Where it's not, you are being subject to an additional whip of capitalism, debt.
5. Migrant jobs have evaporated in many places. As has cheap enough housing. You cannot also save enough to move in most cases, so you cannot even move in practice. If you do so, you're becoming a refugee, which is not a good thing at all. Even more so if you're bound further by different language or culture, or move to especially xenophobic place lured by possibilities.
6. If you have a family, you also need to consider them when moving. If you own property, perhaps inherited, you have to consider what to do with it as well, and you're taking a financial and existential risk. The support network you have (family, friends, connections) will likely not reach to the new area.
7. Enjoying a forced job is like praising your slave master for not beating you too often. Though some jobs have enjoyable elements, these are typically available to elite or lucky few.
This in turn makes other people willing to pay more for whatever person x invested in with the accumulated debt, since debt is cheap and backed by the gov, people today rarely see it is a risk anymore.
As an example there were people who lost their jobs during this pandemic and I was lucky enough not to. The people who lost their jobs received an extra 600 dollars on top of their normal unemployment. This benefited society as a whole since jobs were very scarce for certain groups and kept a lot of people from having problems. If I ever lose my job and take unemployment I won't be upset at those people from receiving an extra benefit during this time period and wish they had been made to suffer instead. I'm also not angry at the local government for building a library on the other side of the city that I will almost certainly never go to.
Bringing it back to these scrimping and saving people, most people save money to reduce their loan burden after college. Its a vanishing small number of people who are not rich or receiving large scholarships that pay for college completely out of pocket