I had to click through the link to read about the teacher with $303,000 in student debt because that is ridiculously off the charts. The vast majority of teacher training programs in the US are 4-year programs at public universities. Here in WA I think the largest school of education is at Western Washington University where the current total direct cost of attendance for in-state students is about $22,000 for tuition, room, and board. Tuition and mandatory fees are only $9,000/year if you choose to live at home and commute. And most residents of the state live within commuting distance of some kind of teacher training program. I expect that is somewhere near the national average give or take. So if a student funded the entire 4-year program with student loans including room and board, and didn't chip in a single dime of her own money with part time jobs, summer jobs, etc. she would still have borrowed less than $100K. And since this woman in question ran up her student loans a decade or more in the past you can reduce those numbers downwards by whatever the education inflation rate has been in the past 10 years. For someone graduating in say 2010 the total cost for four years at a teacher's college was probably closer to $50,000.
Currently the federal borrowing limit for federal student loans is $12,500 annually and $57,500 total and it was proportionately lower in the past when tuitions were lower. So there is no way an ordinary student could come close to borrowing multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars for an undergraduate education. In order to go over those limits you generally have to get what are called "parent plus" loans which are actually loans taken out by the parent not the student.
I was curious what the averages are and this site tells us that the average student loan debt is $32,731, while the median student loan debt amount is $17,000
https://www.valuepenguin.com/average-student-loan-debt and I think that is for all students both undergraduate and graduate. So the average is probably distorted by grad students borrowing heavily for med school, law school, and business school and the median is probably closer to the average undergrad.
The article doesn't give many details about this particular woman's circumstances except that she got an English undergrad degree, an education masters degree, and ran up her debt totals while her loans were in forbearance. What is sounds like to me is that:
1. She probably got her English degree at some sort of expensive private college like an Oberlin or Swarthmore, found out she was pretty unemployable with just a BA in English, and then went on to attend an expensive MA program in education to get more marketable degree, probably also at a private college. Probably running up big private school debts all along this 6-year pathway, probably through parent plus or other unsubsidized private student loans. Which was very unnecessary because there are alternative teacher certification programs at many community colleges which provide a pathway to earning a teaching certificate for people who already have bachelors degrees. I attended one myself. It cost only a few thousand dollars and I was in the classroom earning a salary while I was completing the program. In other words, she probably took the most expensive and longest possible route to getting a teaching certificate. The vast majority of teachers do nothing of the sort unless they are wealthy and parents are paying.
2. She also probably spent a lot of years defaulting on her loans which probably doubled or tripled the original loan amount. Student loan debt it relentless if you don't manage it. The article makes no mention of how much she originally borrowed but I doubt it was even half of what her current debt is.
The larger point is that there are always going to be outliers who have made extremely foolish decisions over the years and who have done things like run up over $300K of debt to get a teaching degree. But they are not the norm. The median student debt in the US is actually $17,000 and a $10,000 loan forgiveness will have a meaningful impact on most of their lives. It ultimately becomes a question of priorities. Money spent forgiving student loans is money not available for other programs. I would personally virulently oppose any proposal to forgive all student debt because that would grossly benefit a lot wealthy doctors, MBAs, and lawyers who can well afford to pay what they borrowed.
But a better Federal program would be to start forcing states to both (1) better subsidize their public universities so that tuition costs are closer to what they used to be in the past, and (2) reduce much of the administrative bloat and gold plated nonsense like luxury stadiums, lazy river pool complexes, and an endless array of high-priced assistant deans in charge of endless nonsense or nothing much at all. The reason student debt is risen so much is because we have basically reneged on the old social contract where we provided affordable public education for all. The current federal student loan program basically just shifts all those costs onto students because they have made it too easy to get money and every time the borrowing limit goes up, tuitions and fees go up too. If you give colleges and universities more free money in form of student loans they have proven they will figure out extravagant ways to spend every last dollar.
As for the other woman in the second story with $250K in student loan debt? She went to NYU which is notoriously one of the most expensive private universities in the country and also one of the stingiest in terms of student aid. The current estimated cost of attendance at NYU is $83,250/year which you can contrast against Western Washington University which I mentioned above at $22,000 per year:
https://www.nyu.edu/admissions/financia ... dance.html
No one needs to go to college at one of the most expensive universities in the country, in the center of Manhattan, the most expensive city in the country. And the rest of us certainly don't have to pay for it.
“THE TALK.” 
