Jim Bratten
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) plans to spend $640 billion in taxpayer money to “wipe out” student college debt if she’s elected president in 2020. Essentially, middle-income level taxpayers would finance debt-free college education for 95% of (upper-middle and higher income level) students. She says each student would receive $50,000 toward their loan debt, paid by taxpayers least likely to afford it.
Yes, her idea is convoluted; another progressive “solution” searching for a problem, when they refuse to identify a cause for rising “student debt.”
The cost of a four-year college education is up 213% and national student debt now stands at $1.7 trillion. In 1993, the average college graduate was saddled with $9,400 in debt from student loans. Average student debt after four years of college in 2018 is now $34,000. Cost of college textbooks has risen even more drastically, faster than housing, health care, and inflation combined. Textbooks have increased an unbelievable 812% from just three decades ago. (Funny, how expensive it becomes when progressives have to rewrite all those history textbooks using their perspective.)
Most executive and administrative staffs at our colleges and universities are paid very well. Baylor University’s president makes $5 million per year. Minimum salaries for average higher education employees appear to be about $200,000/year, since 43,000 “higher education” employees across the country make at least this amount.
At the University of Chicago, its president’s compensation is $1,625,136 per year and the university’s endowment is valued at $8.2 billion. However, Harvard University takes the prize for endowment achievement at $35 billion, dwarfing poor U of Chicago.
How did this happen?
There’s been a massive “higher education” lobbyist force in Washington, DC for decades and they’re very successful. So the largest cause of the college expense explosion is deep involvement by the federal government, pushed by education lobbyists, and delivered through subsidies and loan guarantees. Control is expensive.
Here are the top five universities that reel in gross amounts of federal funding:
• Johns Hopkins Univ.: $2,178,605,000 (one-half from the Dept. of Defense)
• Univ. of Washington (Seattle): $952,738,000
• Univ. of Michigan (Ann Arbor): $829,695,000
• Stanford University: $710,698,000
• Univ. of N. Carolina (Chapel Hill): $676,282,000
The “student debt crisis” eagerly embraced by Democrat presidential hopefuls as a campaign issue has largely been caused by federal subsidies and loan guarantees, promoted by some of these same candidates who have been “bought” by lobbyists. The funding is regulated by the Democrats’ own progressive education bureaucracy. Democrats will use the crisis they built over decades to buy votes to elect them to office to maintain the education system status quo.
It would be a good idea if colleges had to co-sign student loans so they would share in the risk if students defaulted. Another idea would be to remove the federal government from the student loan guarantee business entirely. These two things would drop the inflated costs of a college education drastically since colleges would have to compete for funding. Lastly, federal fingers must be removed from education.
This cannot happen, however, by electing progressives like Warren who don’t “do” solutions. They just build a bigger bureaucracy to “manage” the crisis du jour.
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