Forgiving Student Loans is a Really Bad Idea
John R. “Buck” Surdu and Dan Davis
This week the Leftists and other purveyors of victimhood are at it again, arguing that student loans should be forgiven and abrogated. John Stossel produced an excellent video on this subject. These eighteen-year-olds, supposedly adults, signed a piece of paper agreeing to pay back their loans. Why should they not have to fulfill that contractual obligation? Why is it my responsibility to pay for some other person’s college loan bill? Yet, the Left has pushed the taxpayer’s gratuitous repayment of loans and promotes programs that forgive a certain amount of debt for those who go to work for non-profits, and other programs. As reported by MSN: ” Some Democratic lawmakers, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have been pressing Biden to use his executive authority to cancel up to $50,000 in student loan debt per borrower. As recently as March 31, dozens of Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to the president urging him to extend the pause through year’s end and “to provide meaningful student debt cancellation.” Each extension has cost taxpayers millions to billions of dollars. The doddering fool occupying the White House recently asserted that college, health care, and housing are not only rights but for the uniform provision of which the taxpayers should pay. We have several objections to this ill-founded assertion.
A couple of weeks ago, Dan Davis and I co-wrote an article arguing that there are pathways to successful lives that do not involve college. First, a college degree is not — and should not be — a right, and in many cases is not even a requirement for career success. Secondly, enabling college to be free will expedite the decline in the value of a degree, which is already doubtful. Third, such a policy promotes the proliferation of frivolous degrees and “permanent students.” Fourth, it is a manifest injustice to and slap in the face for generations who sacrificed and worked hard to pay off previous student debts. Fifth, it is in no rational way a constitutionally valid action by the Federal Government. Finally, it helps ensure that the ivory tower Leftists who largely infest our colleges and universities have a ready supply of impressionable candidates for their blatant and unrepentant political indoctrination.
Mike Rowe is a well-known and articulate champion of the non-collegiate trades. He himself is a college graduate and is in favor of college education where appropriate or desired, but not as a prerequisite for a career. He notes, as do many others, that there is a rewarding and available career environment that is accessible to the graduating high school senior or the advanced age career-change candidate. A few years back there was the story of a Dentist who gave up his practice and bought an Alaskan fishing boat as a career change. Some trade schools have no general education requirements, but some, especially the community colleges, have reduced general education requirements. Most get a student “out of the door” with just a few years effort as opposed to the four and five year Bachelor-level programs. Many careers offer opportunities to finish up a BA or BS degree at the student’s discretion, in a subsidized program (industrial or military) and at the student’s leisure. Note that all of these programs are mutually beneficial for both the employer/funder and the employee/student. They are not just another government give-away and bribe for votes by an Administration paying for it with taxpayer sweat.
Secondary education may be seen as a right — and in many places it is a requirement to a certain grade. But one could also argue it is an investment by the society in providing a literate and critical thinking electorate and workforce. So, it is a kind of a contract: “We will help pay for your education, if you are going to be a thoughtful voter and a productive worker.” There was once a time when a high school diploma meant that you were ready to take on the responsibilities of an adult. That is no longer true.
Forgiving student loans and/or making colleges free cheapens the value of the degree in the same way the Left has made high school diplomas nearly meaningless. Nearly every year, there are reports about how a large majority of high school graduates cannot read and write at their grade level, do math at their grade level, or even find North America on a map of the world. Standards in education are plummeting as political and social indoctrination supplants core subjects (e.g., reading, composition, rhetoric, grammar, mathematics, geography, and civics). As Jeffrey Marshall recently published, “The response to an education crisis is to lower standards and implement social justice programs? History since the inception of the Great Society shows these programs do not work. The current education strategy will continue to lower US competitiveness and overall prosperity.” During a recent campus visit a foreign born and educated Dean at a large state university said to one of the authors: “Dan, I can’t understand it. Virtually all of our candidates from certain high schools in this community cannot read and write at any acceptable level and their SAT scores reflect that, but their high school grades are all straight ‘A’s!”
Today’s graduates could not pass 8th or 9th grade competency exams from 100 years ago as reported here and by the Huffington Post. Clearly times have changed, and there are some questions on these exams that may no longer be relevant, but I assert that simple questions of English and Math haven’t changed much, and the continents are still in about the same place they were 100 years ago. Conservatives often refer to the “soft bigotry of low expectations” to describe the Left’s pandering of minorities and lies about systemic racism, but I assert that our entire education system suffers from this bigotry against all our students as we have continued to dumb down our standards in favor of good marks on standardized tests. Despite spending more money per student than most any country in the world, our educational outcomes are in the bottom of the middle third compared to other Western and industrialized nations. During the 1970’s in California, there was a movement that urged the state to “close the gap” in academic achievement. That gap had been observed between the lower Socio-Economic Status (SES) school and the higher SES schools. A state judge ordered the state to take in all primary and secondary school money and distribute it equally so that each school received the same amount for any student, despite there being several studies that show that academic achievement is related more to parent involvement than money. A few years ago, the local news papers reported a slight uptick in all test scores, but ruefully noted that the achievement gap was unchanged after half a century. In a conversation with a MEd graduate of UCLA’s well-respected School of Education, one author asked why the students in lower SES schools did so poorly and the response was: “The rich public schools have more money.” She had never even heard of the Priest Case. Something her professors “forgot” to tell her during their lectures on social justice.
If students know they can stay in school, racking up more and more debt that someone else will pay, this encourages more permanent students in the ivory towers of academia. As a nation we need meaningful degrees upholding high standards in fields of endeavor that are important to our nation’s competitiveness in the world. We need people learning useful skills, creating jobs, and building things. We need many fewer academicians who have never had to live in the real world telling others what to think. We need fewer Leftists hiding behind walls of academic institutions criticizing others instead of doing things themselves. It is easy to critique and hard to create. A large percentage of academicians fall into the “critique” type instead of “create” category.
I published an article some time back about student loans. Due to the movement of AFNN from one hosting platform to another, I reposed the article recently here. In that article, and in the recent article with Dan Davis, I asserted that many students get frivolous degrees in subjects that have no earning potential. That is not my fault; it is not the fault of people who get useful degrees; and it isn’t the responsibility of hard-working taxpayers to subsidize these poor choices. If there is a student loan crisis, like most problems facing our nation, that crisis was created by politicians in DC. As I posted previously, I have proposed a simple answer to the student loan crisis.
The short answer is to enforce the 10th Amendment and get the government out of the student loan business entirely. Let the free market that the Leftists hate so much do what it does best and get the government out of what it does so poorly: meddling with the economy.
When I take out a home or car loan, the bank uses my credit rating, earning potential, and other factors to assess their risk of me being able to pay back the loan. If I am a higher risk, I have a higher interest rate, and it essentially costs me more to borrow that money. At least that’s how it works unless you are in a preferred demographic. Interest rates reflect the lender’s risk. If the banks were free to set interest rates for student loans that reflect their risk, we would simultaneously control the rate of college tuition growth and encourage people to major in subjects with more earning potential (and value to the future of the nation)…
Under this system perhaps schools would be forced to compete on the value of their education. They would have to work with the hated free market and industry to explain the value of degrees considered frivolous or offer fewer of those frivolous degrees. Perhaps schools would have to explain to parents the low employment rates of their graduates. As a hiring manager, I know there are schools and degrees that are not worth my time interviewing applicants, because the schools have lied to the students about the value of their degrees.
My cynical nature tells me that the Left has several underlying reasons to want to forgive student loans. First, by their words and deeds they clearly loath people with lower education — the deplorables. Second, forgiving student loans encourages more students to attend colleges they cannot afford. This provides the Left with a reservoir of impressionable youth for political indoctrination. There are thousands of anecdotes of students who do not believe the political and social indoctrination of their Leftist professors but go along because of fear of repercussions from their professors if they share their true feelings. Professor Leon Festinger did a significant amount of research showing that if one can get another to espouse a stance, they will perforce begin to adopt that stance, regardless of their own previous opinion. A young teaching student I know was threatened that if she did not go along with the gender ideology nonsense of her professor and the rest of the woke school faculty that she would be denied a teaching position upon graduation. Finally, it is a transparent attempt to buy votes by pandering to those who have made poor life choices.
When raising a child, most non-woke parents understand that behavior you reward flourishes and behavior you punish diminishes. Rewarding poor life choices by freeing students who pursued useless degrees from their contractual obligations to pay back their debt, the government is also punishing hard-working, tax-paying citizens. we ask again: “Why is it my responsibility to pay for someone else’s college degree?” And if I must pay for someone else’s college degree, then we should have a (deciding) vote in what that student studies. Our vote will be for a degree in something useful to the nation, not a frivolous degree that ends in ” … Studies.”
Where does the madness end? Do we taxpayers have to pay for other kinds of loans with the stroke of a pen? Does agreeing to pay back a loan cease to have meaning if there are no repercussions for deadbeats? Should taxpayers be forced to pay when someone idler a check? After all, a check is a promise of future payment (executed by the bank) just as a student makes a promise to repay a loan.
Eighteen-year-olds claim to be adults. We wasted thirty years wearing the uniforms of an Army and Navy that no longer exist, in the service of a country that no longer exists. In the America in which we grew up, being an adult meant taking responsibility for one’s choices and actions. Blaming others and demanding that someone else pay their debts is NOT an example of adults taking responsibility for their actions. It is an example of pampered, self-important, selfish posers whining that their poor choices are someone else’s fault. The establishment and provisioning of the various “victim” classes is a whim the Nation cannot afford. Many, many people have paid their student loan debts. That’s what real adults do. No one forced those students to take out a loan or to major in something with no economic or market value. No one should force me to pay those people’s loans for them. Adjustments for service in community benefiting charities might more legitimately be thought of as a rational deduction from taxable income, assuming (as we do NOT) that the IRS has rationally and equitable decided which non-profits are providing useful services to the public at large, not just to fostering another “victim” class.
There is an old saw that says: “Never take a problem to your boss without a few suggested solutions.” Following that advice from that aphorism, may we suggest:
- Voting for candidates from any party that favor individual rights not group pandering
- Voting for candidates who recognize that their funds are not the “Government’s” but are the people’s
- Ousting by recall, when available, all those currently in power — on both sides of the aisle — who feel otherwise.
- Asking the hard questions:
- How much will this cost? How much will it really cost rather than how much will politicians claim it will cost?
- Why do all of us pay for this?
- Will beneficiaries contribute more to society?
- What are the goals and the metrics for any program? Does the Government actually use metrics?
- When will we make a fact-, data-, and analysis-based decision on whether to continue the program? Or with this be another government program that lives forever regardless of its efficacy or cost? (Thomas Sowell has repeatedly and wisely said that the black community was better off a hundred years after slavery than fifty years after affirmative action, yet we continue to purchase votes by pandering to minorities with programs that do them no good — but at least those have the Government virtue of forcibly extracting money from productive citizens.)
- What will happen if we continue to spend more than the tax revenue?
Forgiving student loans is a bad idea, and we urge everyone to actively oppose this ill-conceived notion.
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