AGREED: Student debt is not the problem, the Higher Education Cartel Is.
To the extent he thinks about it, President Joe Biden is probably expecting to be canonized by millennials whose student-loan debt he’s paring down.
Depending on how the question is asked, though, the move is not popular. In a Trafalgar Group poll released on Sept. 12, more than half of likely voters – 55.6 percent – and 64.6 percent of self-described independents said that they’d be “less likely” to cast their ballot for someone who backed the Biden debt relief plan. Other polls have shown the opposite sentiment.
In truth, however, the issue of student-loan forgiveness is a distraction from the real problem in higher education. Tuition rates have risen faster than inflation for decades. What no one wants to confront, even as we proceed to forgive as much as $1 trillion in student loan debt, is what has created the whole situation: the stranglehold that the higher-education cartel has on colleges and universities.
Of course, student loans have allowed those tuition rises. “The last person to look at this seriously was William Bennett, back when he was Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education. A study he commissioned found that tuition rates rose each year by about as much as Congress boosted federal educational assistance to college students.”