On Higher Education
![Over the last decades, college tuitions have increased at nearly three times the rate of inflation - faster even than medical costs. The costs have become giant burdens on families and students, who often graduate with over $100,000 in debt.
Why have colleges raised their costs so high? Because government-backed school loans allow them to.
No matter how ludicrously high a tuition a college charges, a student can get a government backed loan to pay the tuition. Thus, colleges have every incentive to raise tuition, and no incentive to lower it.
On the other hand, if those loans didn't exist, many students would be unable to afford the artificially-inflated tuition. Colleges would have to either dramatically lower their tuitions, or go out of business.
Imagine if instead of graduating with $100,000 in debt, students could graduate with $0 in debt. Imagine if instead of saving money for college for 10 years, parents could easily afford college tuitions.
Imagine if instead of competing on who could have the most expensive stadiums, ballrooms, and presidential salaries, colleges competed to provide the best education at the lowest cost.
We can have all that if we force colleges to compete to lower their costs. And to do that, we must eliminate the Federal Student Loan program. Give colleges the same choice any other business has: provide great service at reasonable prices, or go out of business.
We don't need to phase this in gradually. We don't need to reduce student loans by 5% or even 50%. We need to immediately end Federal Student Loan program, and force colleges to charge affordable and reasonable prices, starting now.
Let's immediately make college education actually affordable to all Americans, and make student debt a distant memory. Let's stop subsidizing college greed and irresponsibility, and give colleges no choice but to lower costs.
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This
is EXACTLY WHY the affordability of higher education is escaping the
middle class. The more Uncle Sam hikes the loan limits, the more
colleges raise their tuition. There is absolutely no incentive for
higher educational institutions to control their costs nor to hold the
line on their tuition rates, much like the medical industry had no
incentive to control their costs because insurance rates and payouts
kept on increasing.
This is a vicious cycle. Colleges raise
tuition, feds raise amounts for student loans, young people go into
higher and higher levels of debt that they won't be able to pay, on
loans in which there is no forgiveness or even a chance of filing for
bankruptcy, resulting in near lifetimes of indentured servitude to the
State.
This cannot, of course, be sustained. Fewer and fewer
middle class people will be able to afford to take out the loans
necessary to go to college, leaving college as a luxury to be afforded
by the very rich, or as a handout to the poor who are more likely to
qualify for grants.
This, along with confiscatory taxation on
otherwise upwardly mobile small business entrepreneurs, will only serve
to widen the gap between the trust fund rich and the middle class, and
eventually will squeeze out the middle class entirely.
Welcome to your brave new world.
Posted by Leo Pusateri at 10:32 PM |
Labels:
Big Government,
liberal road to hell
