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We heard a lot this election cycle, from the Democrats especially, about making college education affordable if not free. And it seems the media is full of stories of students graduating with tens of thousands of dollars of debt, and in this economy, no clear job path to allow them to pay it off. Meanwhile, public university tuitions are rising to unprecedented levels, levels on par with their private counterparts, while private institutions around the country are going belly up. How do we fix this?
Jason Delisle is a resident fellow at AEI where he studies higher education financing with an emphasis on student loan programs. He started out on Capitol Hill, working for Representative Thomas Petri and then the Senate Committee on the Budget. Before joining AEI, he was the director of the Federal Education Budget Project at New America.
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We’re often told by liberals that “no one needs” ________. Fill in the blank with “an ‘assault’ rifle”, “air conditioning”, “that much money”, or any one of a thousand things.
The truth is that many do not need a college education. There was a time when a college degree was necessary to procure a well-paid and/or high-status job. That is no longer always the case.
When the price of a college education represented a much smaller proportion of the average family’s wealth, and when the benefits were manifest, the decision to attend was easier – though it was obviously not always easy for families at the lower end of the income scale to pay.
Now that the cost of college is a much larger part of the average family’s wealth, and wealthier folks are expected to subsidize to an even greater extent the tuition assistance obtained by less-wealthy students, it has become a tougher call for people all across the wealth scale.
In the past, it was common for working class parents to say to their kids, “We just can’t afford it; you’re going to have to come help us in the shop.” Now, it may become common for affluent parents to say, “Hey, this outlay is going to diminish the cushiness of our retirement; maybe you should look at a trade school or community college.”
You did not mention the predominate cause for the explosion in credentialing was the need for a workaround of the Supreme Court’s Griggs v. Duke Power decision. Revisit that and the need for a substantial percentage of higher education disappears.
I was also disappointed, but not surprised, not to hear the one word that could cut the Gordian Knot on the higher cost issue – bankruptcy. When Joe Biden, D-MBNA, was rewriting the Bankruptcy Act to preclude any room for flexibility on student loan debt Republicans lost their best chance to be on the right side of social justice as well as the best chance to defund one of the left’s most pernicious and unaccountable power bases. Allowing a well intentioned student to include student loan debt in a bankruptcy filing, say, seven years after trying to make a go of it would do more to reorient the feminist dance therapy majors than any other policy.
It’s interesting that the median level of debt that is defaulted is around $8900. Having just put 3 kids through college, I know that is somewhere around the level of government subsidized loans a student can receive each year. And that’s the problem: Colleges get all the benefit of those loans, but bear no risk on repayment. So of course they will do everything they can to encourage as many students as possible to take out those loans, whether or not they have any chance of graduating, getting a job, and repaying them. Once they’ve captured that money, repayment is a problem between the government and the student. It’s the same problem that emerges anytime you have a third party payer.
So the fact that so many students take out loans, go a year or two to college, then quit, is a feature rather than a bug as far as colleges are concerned. They’ve got their money. The only solution is to make colleges bear the risk of repayment, not the government
I’m going to listen to this later, but I am very reluctant to. Mainstream conservatives get education wronger than wrong in my experience. There are only a few exceptions with the best among them being Peter Lawler. I can’t wait for his book on academic heresies to come out. I’ll revisit this thread after listening to the interview, but I’m usually disappointed with the amount of interest Jim takes in these comments.