The recent increase in student loan rates is a significant injustice for people who hold student loans. But the politics of this issue is often presented misleadingly. It is treated as a generational question, much as a decrease in Social Security benefits would be a threat to seniors. There are two problems with that analysis: (1) most young people are not conventional college students or college graduates, and (2) many college students are not young.

The National Journal’s Elahe Izadi has a good piece making those points. She also notes that the most severe student loan burden falls on older grads (age 30+). She quotes me on politicians’ tendency to ignore issues that confront the non-college-bound youth. I say that working-class young people are “not really part of the political situation.”

More generally, young people do not act like a political interest group because their circumstances and interests vary too much, and because their horizons extend beyond youth, which is a short phase. The fact that they do not act like an interest group is one reason they are easy to ignore in politics.