By Michael Brendan Dougherty
Wednesday, April 27, 2022
The plan being mulled by the Biden administration to
cancel and forgive up to $1.6 trillion of federal student-loan debt is
a brazen act of class warfare by the affluent against everyone else. It is a
politically, and cosmically, unjustifiable robbery that offers yet more rope
for the decadent and totally indefensible American college system to become
even more decadent and indefensible.
The overwhelming majority of student debt is held by the
affluent; less than 10 percent of it is held by the bottom third of earners.
Nearly 40 percent of it is held by students who earned advanced degrees — many
of them now doctors and lawyers. Unemployment for the college-educated is less
than 2 percent.
At every level, the American college system is deranged
by the government guarantees and preferment extended to student debt. At the
lowest end, schools take advantage of government-guaranteed student loans to
prey on service-sector workers. They market a college education as a path of
upward mobility, while knowing that most of their students never graduate, or
simply return to the service industry after graduation. All that these colleges
do is load five-figure-earning students with debt, which is transformed into
six-figure salaries for third-rate professors and administrators.
In the great middle tier, the oceans of student debt have
inspired colleges to become luxury resorts for the youth. They build endless
recreational and athletic facilities, they install baroque food courts in an
appalling race to offer something first-rate. These schools are increasingly
trying to insert themselves as gatekeepers into fields such as turf management
and catering, which never required college education before.
If you view the top-tier colleges from their balance
sheets alone, they look like enormous tax-advantaged hedge funds with minuscule
vestigial educational institutions named Yale or Harvard attached to them. The
student-loan fix has allowed them to raise tuition above $50,000 a year
annually. These exorbitant prices, driven by the ocean of loan money guaranteed
by the government, help fund the expansion of the administrator class. There
are more social managers and commissars than professors at many schools now.
Forgiving student loan debt would be an act of absolution
pronounced over this corruption of higher education. Paired with no reform, it
does nothing to reduce the profligacy, cost, and predatory nature of these
institutions. It only encourages it, and implicitly promises amnesties in the
future.
Some legislators, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have
suggested that student-loan forgiveness is a necessary part of jump-starting
the post-Covid economy. Does this economy need another $1.6 trillion jump-start?
Does it need to repair household balance sheets for the affluent? Of course
not.
The program isn’t just a matter of grave executive
overreach, but tears directly at the social fabric. It makes into suckers those
people who either paid student debt early, or who — looking at the expense and
value of a college education — instead chose a different path in life. The
tradesman who took out a loan for an F-150, subject to underwriting, may get to
count it as a business expense. But unless he goes through bankruptcy, it would
still weigh on his monthly budget.
Executive loan forgiveness threatens to make student-loan
debt not just the subject of financial advantage, but to turn the act of
attending an expensive college into something like an act of political allegiance.
One takes on the debt and then simply trusts that it will be forgiven. A
professional middle-class protection racket, or conspiracy.
It reflects a progressive faith in what might be called
“pro-social negligence.” Democrats create a zone of lawlessness, predation, and
danger for illegal immigrants by setting up policy and enforcement of
immigration law to encourage illegal crossings. They do so because they think
immigration itself is good, that it changes the nature and composition of
American society in ways that they approve. Likewise, with colleges, Democrats
are encouraging all the worst and most irresponsible behavior in higher
education because they believe education is good in itself. The expansion of an
indebted email caste is a form of self-interested patronage. It would be like
your great-grandfather’s Republican Party using the Treasury to suddenly
forgive all back-due country-club fees in order to keep their sons in plus
fours.
The sudden redesignation of existing debts of the most
politically influential bloc of well-off voters amounts to an ugly bribe worthy
of a banana republic. It’s not just a moral hazard, but a moral crime.
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