While the nation is rightly worried about the proliferation of antisemitism on its college campuses, another higher education abuse also needs prompt attention.
On Dec. 6 – St. Nicholas Day – President Biden handed student loan defaulters another $5 billion gift in debt forgiveness. The administration’s eagerness to win the votes of student loan borrowers by shifting the cost of student debt from borrowers to taxpayers now adds up to $132 billion of student loans those borrowers will not have to pay — even though the Supreme Court ruled a related scheme unconstitutional last June.
But if borrowers don’t pay the debts they incurred and default on their debts, someone else has to pay. Right now, that someone else is American taxpayers. Now it’s time that the cost of nonpayment of student loans be shared by those who have benefitted the most directly from federal student loans: namely, the colleges and universities themselves.
By inducing their students to borrow from the government, higher education institutions collect vastly inflated tuition and fees, which they then spend without worrying about whether the loans will ever be repaid. This in turn incentivizes them to push the tuition and fees, and room and board, ever higher — by an average of 169 percent since 1980, according to a Georgetown University study.
In short, in the current system the colleges get and spend billions in borrowed money and put all the loan risk on somebody else — including those student borrowers who responsibly pay off their own debt and those who never borrowed in the first place, not to mention taxpayers, whether they attended a college or not.
