Prevent College Debt, Don’t Just Forgive It

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Friday, July 07, 2023

 

Among conservatives, it was time to pop open bottles of champagne when the Supreme Court ruled that Joe Biden’s attempt to forgive $430 billion in college debt for an estimated 26 million borrowers was unlawful.

 

The White House plan was plainly unconstitutional: An early War on Terror measure that Congress designed for a small number of military-service members should not be applied to a significant portion of the U.S. population over 20 years later. It was also unjustly regressive — it robs from non-college workers to give to doctors and lawyers. It was an act of class warfare on behalf of the affluent against everyone else.

 

And the White House is already trying a “plan B” for debt forgiveness — showing that its pandemic justification was just a convenient political expediency. Forgiving college debt is a political payoff and lure for young voters in 2024. It is the Biden administration’s attempt to transform the act of attending an American college, from one of bettering yourself and your prospects through learning, to something more like a political gang allegiance.

 

But it would be wrong to stop at simply opposing the White House’s plans. The truth is that student debt is abusive. And the problem with Biden’s forgiveness plan is that it does nothing to stop the abuse and would likely worsen it by setting a precedent that Democratic White Houses will forgive large portions of student debt.

 

Our society uses the state to provide cash subsidies to the elderly and then finances debt for the young. The result is older affluent people buying more golf carts than they need, and young people delaying the formation of families. Other nations with much less expensive colleges have programs for forgiving student debt. For example, Hungary forgives student debt for mothers under age 30 who have a child during university or within two years of graduation.

 

The result of our student-debt system is spiraling college inflation. The cost of college vastly outstrips incomes and has already made all those shopworn statistics about the monetary value of a degree into lies. What have colleges done with this gusher of cash? Take a look at Harvard and Yale.

 

Since 1986, Harvard’s tuition has seen an 89 percent increase in adjusted dollars. Has the school expanded its faculty and course offerings to match that increase? No. It has dramatically expanded its population of administrators. Harvard now employs over 7,000 full-time administrators, slightly more people than the entire undergraduate population. And more than three times the number of faculty members.

 

The students themselves complain about the labyrinthine buildings that house these functionaries, many of whom exist to politicize life on campus — to populate task forces on Inclusion and Belonging that conduct focus groups and surveys, only to conclude that the university should hire yet another administrator to oversee yet another committee.

 

Between 2003 and 2021, the number of vice presidents at Yale grew from five to 31 (a 520 percent increase), while the number of faculty members increased from 610 to 675 (a 10 percent increase). Many administrative units have seen a 150 percent increase in size over the last 20 years at Yale, with surging salaries.

 

Where formerly a school might have a small department overseeing its course catalogue, now the catalogue cannot even be produced without meetings with endless bodies about who will manage the image of the school’s logos, or advise on the diversity and inclusion represented in the photographs of the campus. What we are seeing is the creation and perpetual endowment of make-work political jobs for the professional managerial class at schools.

 

These useless administrators are the true beneficiaries of the student-debt-forgiveness program. It should be the goal of conservatives to institute rapid, expansive college-tuition deflation, with a consequent cashiering of useless administrators. This should be considered the nicer alternative to a sacking-the-monasteries approach of Henry VIII. This deflation would benefit everyone, perhaps even many liberals themselves. After all, do they not want to see doctors and lawyers graduating with a manageable debt load so that they can choose more service-oriented work, in poorer communities?

 

And while we’re at it, we need to rebalance the government benefits given to help college students with what we give (or currently don’t) to the majority of graduating high-school students who decide that another path in life is the productive one for them.