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President Joe Biden announced the same in 2024 after a last-minute surge of young voters to polling places in the 2022 midterm elections, in his first attempt at large-scale student loan forgiveness, before it was invalidated by the Supreme Court. About to try the trick again. In the battleground state of Michigan, on April 8, the president announced another plan to unilaterally reduce or eliminate loans for 23 million undergraduate and graduate student borrowers.
After smaller, moderate attempts, and now announcing a third round of student loan forgiveness, the Biden administration is performing a cynical dance with young voters: Vote for me now and bypass Congress. When this latest ploy is withdrawn, the courts will blame them from under them. But the oldest demagogue trick in the book is likely to succeed, as Republicans have not advanced any serious alternatives to address the growing student loan crisis.
The student debt crisis is very real, at $1.7 trillion, and the crisis is serious. The reason lies in the simple truth that the value of a college degree has not kept pace with rising tuition costs. College tuition costs have soared in recent decades, far outpacing the already inflated costs of middle-class necessities such as medical bills and grocery bills, a rise that has been helped by generous government loans and subsidies. , and fueled by the greed of the universities themselves, which label themselves as “not-for-profit.”
Biden accuses new student loan relief plan of “shattering the Constitution”: “A shocking act of contempt”
Universities took advantage of this taxpayer-funded boom to hire disproportionately large numbers of administrators and bureaucrats to attract the next batch of hapless 18-year-old graduates alongside Harry Potter classes. They built fantasy-like facilities such as a lazy river and a rock-climbing wall. -age.
President Joe Biden has repeatedly tried to buy votes with student loan relief. Here he speaks at an event on student loan cancellation on Monday, April 8, 2024, at Madison Regional Technical College Tuax Campus in Madison, Wisconsin.
A combination of federal incentives and a lack of institutional rigor has led universities to lower their academic standards for admission, ultimately leading to just 60 percent of new students graduating in six years instead of four.
Four out of ten are in the unenviable position of having college loans but no degree, a situation that predictably often leads to default. If this was a private bank making a six-figure loan to an 18-year-old for a trip to Machu Picchu, everyone would recognize this scheme as predatory, but for some reason the university Excluded from the scope. Private banks are essentially non-existent in the student loan market, where the federal government holds 93% of all loans.
All of this has worked out well for universities, allowing some to build endowments comparable to the top 10 hedge funds, but bad for others. Hobson says graduating high school students are being forced to choose between taking out increasingly expensive loans for depreciating degrees or facing a shrinking market for jobs that don’t require qualifications.
The latter is also due to the sudden discovery that entry-level positions that didn’t require a bachelor’s degree 20 years ago perform much better with receptionists with degrees in queer studies. The trend is shrinking even further as expanded regulations in the Civil Rights Act prohibit employers from doing so. Its authors do not intend it to administer any other assessment of basic competency in nature.
Simple screening tests that require potential employees to demonstrate some aptitude for work tasks produce “disparate effects” at the racial group level, which is an unacceptable reality for the DEI crowd. It’s an unjust system, aptly described by legal scholar Gail Herriot, a longtime member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, as an interpretation of the law that “makes almost everything presumptively illegal.”
That is, everything that the EEOC, the commission of unelected officials that governs the application of Title VII, chooses to consider. Conveniently, the EEOC has never applied the same disparate impact lens to a $100,000 college credential that creates burdensome debt as well as racial disparities.
Coupled with degree inflation, increased government financing, and the growing academic unseriousness of universities themselves, this dynamic has created a kind of “credential treadmill,” in which young Americans increasingly struggle to maintain their status. I ended up having to take out loans to get my degree. Their parents worked the same jobs without six-figure loans.
This is an unsustainable treadmill, which is why, if Biden’s first attempt at constitutional pardon had been successful, we would be back to the level of our current debt crisis in just four years. .
Supporters of student loan forgiveness demonstrate in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on June 30, 2023. (Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images)
Forgiving loans without reforming the system and giving colleges a reason to offer better value at lower costs, as the Biden administration is proposing, is only a temporary band-aid. This is deeply unfair to the millions of taxpayers who either didn’t go to college or worked hard to pay off their loans, but are now hit with this bill.
But like other schemes to extort money from Peter to pay Paul, this scheme was designed to help desperate young voters start their lives with debts that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago. popular among
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The reality is that the cost of college and the resulting debt catastrophe persist, impacting millions of Americans – Americans who vote. Democrats will continue to cynically use the benefits of public debt to boost their poll numbers while doing nothing to address the fundamental problems in higher education.
The only fair solution is to replace this bill (which is now upon taxpayers, whether we like it or not) with a system that leaves everyone else in debt and on the hook. Apply it to the universities that make a lot of money from it, where it rightfully belongs.
Republicans should offer debt forgiveness and restructuring for the same borrowers that the Biden administration is appealing for, but instead of asking mechanics without four-year degrees to pay their checks, they should increase taxes on college endowments. They should pay by closing loopholes. Around other university money making enterprises.
Unlike any of the current administration’s three amnesty plans, this solution would not blow a hole in the federal budget, which is already running a deficit, and would provide financially struggling Americans with out-of-pocket funding to repay other people’s loans. It is not a request to cut off.
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More importantly, tying the university sector itself to the student debt issue ultimately forces higher education institutions to some degree of involvement, giving them a sharp incentive to take responsibility for their graduates’ debt burdens. become.
A combination of federal incentives and a lack of institutional rigor has led universities to lower their academic standards for admission, ultimately leading to just 60 percent of new students graduating in six years instead of four.
Since the 1960s, we have lavished benefits and honors on our universities. Governments have spent trillions of dollars to get as many people into college halls as possible. The university has proven itself to be completely undeserving of such special treatment.
Instead of cynical band-aids and election-year ploys, we will invest millions not from one citizen group to another, but from the pockets of universities that have grown rich selling products that negatively impact students. Real debt relief should be provided to millions of people. For America.
