These days, Robert Applebaum is feeling vindicated.
In January 2009, Applebaum, then a 35-year-old lawyer with more than $80,000 in student debt, created a petition calling for student loan forgiveness to stimulate the economy. It was greeted with a few weeks of buzz and plenty of scorn. Then, for more than two years, silence.
Then student loan balances passed $1 trillion, interest rates spent a week as the focus of the nascent 2012 presidential campaign, and suddenly everyone wanted to talk about student debt. …