11/29/2020
It is more a damnation of colleges, bi-coastal elitism, and fake concern over racism and gender than anything else. Certainly, the cost of education needs attention, however just wildly throwing bales of money at the problem has about the same chance of success as Iran's love of America after receiving $1.4 TRILLION in cash bribes. The whole system needs fixin'. All universities' endowments need to come into play. The role of any university is education.......not storerooms of capital.
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There is no such thing as “student-loan forgiveness.” There is only a student-loan transfer to the American taxpayer, including taxpayers who have never even sniffed the inside of a college classroom — and taxpayers who paid, or are paying off, their own loans, despite the scrimping and saving, taking the extra job, or any number of additional hardships required to do so.
Debt forgiveness makes an utter mockery of their efforts.
Moreover, the federal government, which owns about 90% of student debt, already has a number of programs that allow borrowers to avoid paying off loans in their entirety, such as “income-driven repayment” options, which forgive the remaining debt after 20-25 years, or as little as 10 years for those who work in public service.
So what’s this really all about? The denigration of honor and personal responsibility, as well as the wholesale abrogation of freely made contractual obligations, sold as “compassion.” The catering to any number of students and their equally corrupted supporters — a Deadbeat Constituency as it were — who see no problem with getting an education and subsequently deciding someone else should pay for it.
But wait, there’s more. “The average cost of attending a four-year college or university in the United States rose by 497% between the 1985-86 and 2017-18 academic years,” explains columnist Erik Sherman, who adds that’s “more than twice the rate of inflation.”
That’s because when taxpayers are the ultimate backstop for all student-loan defaults, colleges are wholly immunized from sustaining any losses. Thus, they can raise their prices with impunity.
Moreover, colleges remain immune not only from fiscal responsibility but from educational accountability as well. A system that would point students toward statistically well-paying majors has been fiercely resisted by colleges replete not only with worthless majors but with ever-expanding bureaucracies invariably tied to some aspect of “social justice” or “diversity” — all of which drive up tuition costs.
Loan forgiveness would exacerbate, not mitigate, this loathsome reality.
And because of that irrefutable dynamic, the inevitable question arises: What makes anyone think student-loan forgiveness will be a one-off? College costs continue to rise, and most parents and students remain erroneously convinced a college degree is an absolute prerequisite for success. When the next wave of students can’t pay off their loans, what then?
A well-known definition of “insanity,” as in doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, is the most benevolent interpretation of what Democrats are attempting to do. A less benevolent but far more accurate interpretation is the ongoing effort to get younger generations of Americans wholly comfortable with relying on government to solve their problems — even to the point of moral bankruptcy, which is exactly what welching on one’s freely made contractual obligations is all about.
“Hardly anything could be more divisive than shunting taxpayer dollars at folks who’ve been to college while low-skilled workers bear the brunt of our current economic pain,” the National Review editorial board concludes.
For college-educated, bi-coastal American elites who view half of America as “deplorable,” that’s a feature, not a bug.