Let’s stop the conversation about student loan forgiveness and start one about the necessity of saying we’re sorry.

After all, it’s not the borrowers who did anything wrong — it’s the country. We’re the ones who should be asking their forgiveness.

Teenagers go to college because we tell them to. Many people in their 20s pursue graduate education because an advanced degree is what they need to prosecute criminals, cure cancer and teach or counsel those teenagers.

And for decades we’ve failed these students over and over.

We’ve left them mostly on their own to pay for the betterment of themselves and society, and then heaped one administrative burden after another on them along the way.

Pell Grants should be renamed in honor of Ebenezer Scrooge. Franz Kafka appears to have written the rules governing our student debt system, while Rube Goldberg collects the monthly payments.

And if you can’t pay? The legal guidelines in bankruptcy court often demand that those wanting out from under their student loans quite literally have a “certainty of hopelessness.” Those woebegone souls must prostrate themselves in front of judges, begging their honors to declare them complete and total failures.

Forgiveness for these sins might — might — be reasonable. After all, plenty of policymakers were at least trying to do the right thing along the way as this slow-motion monstrosity came into focus.

If President Biden removes $10,000 of federal student loan debt per borrower, it would total $321 billion, according to Federal Reserve Bank of New York estimates. That would leave 69 percent of debtors with remaining balances.

That is a large dollar figure, but its size ought to help reframe the national conversation around what we owe the victims of this scandalous failure of public policy. This is especially true for the roughly 40 percent of borrowers who acquired some debt but did not get a degree after six years — and thus lack the earning power that a diploma often brings, according to Mark Huelsman, the director of policy and advocacy at the Hope Center for College, Community and Justice at Temple University, who looked at students entering in the 2011-12 school year.

Still not convinced that the nation should ask debtors for absolution, and not the other way around? Consider the facts.

First, there’s the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, which for decades has yoked millions of students and families each year to its cumbersome form, confusing questions and confounding — and infuriating — “expected family contribution.” New legislation brings the number of questions down to a maximum of 36 from 108, but it, too, is so complex that it’s taking years to fully carry out the changes. And that does nothing to address the chasm that exists between what the federal system (and a second one, the CSS Profile, that many private colleges use) “expects” and what feels realistic to many families.

So what about Pell Grants?

They were named for Senator Claiborne Pell in 1980, though earlier versions existed for years because it had long been clear that the lowest-income teenagers couldn’t afford many colleges. But the help those grants offer has dwindled because legislators did not set the annual amount per person to track any index of college costs.

Phillip Levine, a Wellesley College economics professor and the author of a new book called “A Problem of Fit: How the Complexity of Pricing Hurts Students — and Universities,” has c