Student debt

Thursday

Peter Wood

The unforgiving history of student loans

Republicans in the House are considering a bill to make major changes in federal student loans for college, and President Trump is floating the idea of making colleges responsible for borrowers who fail to repay. For decades student loans and their repayment are never far the center of controversy, but it wasn’t always that way. I grew up in the era before massive student debt. Student loans were available in 1971 when I went off to college, but they didn’t dominate the terrain like a Tyrannosaurus rex. They were more like Barney, the joyful purple denizen of PBS, who had a ferocious appetite for public funds but had not yet evolved into the carnivore who preys on the livelihoods of college graduates.   But the student-loan monster had already been born.

student loans

Friday

Amber Duke

SCOTUS has made the right call on student debt forgiveness

The Supreme Court correctly overruled President Joe Biden's attempt to use executive power to forgive student loan debt on Friday. As the court explained, while the HEROES Act gives the president the emergency authority to "waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to" student loans, the intention of the legislation was for modest, mostly procedural, changes. It was never meant to confer the power to cancel debt entirely, and certainly not to the tune of over $400 billion on the taxpayer dime. Further, Biden justified forgiving student debt under the HEROES Act by defining the Covid-19 pandemic as a "national emergency." Unfortunately for his legal chances, he declared the pandemic "over" just weeks after announcing the forgiveness plan.

college student debt mike hilgers student loan forgiveness

Tuesday

Amber Duke

‘Very positive’: Nebraska AG on oral arguments against student debt forgiveness

Nebraska attorney general Mike Hilgers expressed optimism about the outcome of a Supreme Court case challenging President Joe Biden's student debt forgiveness program during a Tuesday interview with The Spectator. Hilgers said following oral arguments on Tuesday morning that the justices asked "very positive" questions about the White House's authority to institute the program, which would offer up to $20,000 in loan forgiveness to individual borrowers making less than $125,000 a year or $250,000 a year for households. "To some degree it's always a little bit of reading the tea leaves, but I thought I the questions the justices asked were very positive.

college student debt mike hilgers student loan forgiveness

Tuesday

Amber Duke

Stop telling people not to go to college

In light of President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, conservatives have revamped their rallying cry that college is a scam and no one should go. In a lot of ways, college is a scam. It is certainly too expensive. Oftentimes, students spend more time awash in woke politics than learning important life and career skills. However, it’s reductionist and not very helpful to tell young people that college isn’t ever worth their time. The oft-cited alternative to college is trade school. Conservatives correctly point out that plumbers, electricians, and similar tradesmen can earn just as much as some college graduates. Their training, meanwhile, is a fraction of the cost of a bachelor's degree. However, we need to be careful about glamorizing manual labor.

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Christopher J. Scalia

The faulty towers of higher education

One of the few issues about which the American left and right agree is that higher education is, as Orwell would say, in a bad way. But even in that source of agreement lurk countless points of dispute, regarding the sources of dysfunction (corporate greed, grade inflation, libezoomers?) and possible solutions (ending tenure, forgiving debt, creating safe spaces?). In After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics — and How to Fix It, Will Bunch, a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, argues that the cause of the higher-education crisis is conceptual: we see higher education as a personal privilege rather than a public good, something to be earned rather than a right that is owed.

Wednesday

Ben Domenech

Biden’s unforgivable student loan authoritarianism

The frame for virtually any discussion of American politics at the moment advanced by the hair-on-fire segment of our media elite is that democracy itself is under attack. We are surrounded, according to the likes of CNN's Brian Stelter (peace be upon him), by those who would tear down the foundations upon which the government and ordered law of the United States of America stands, in a frontal illiberal assault on the institutions that keep us free. Fear the QAnon Shaman and his Viking hat! We all remember how close he came to ruling us all astride the floor of Congress.

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Monday

Rikki Schlott

Why I joined the college exodus

In the spring of 2020, the pandemic catalyzed a startling personal revelation. As a begrudging student of Zoom University, I came to the realization that a college degree might not be worth it. Pre-pandemic Rikki was a dutiful, head-down student at New York University with a 4.0 GPA and her eyes set on law school. But when the world locked down in the middle of my sophomore year and my university still demanded full tuition for virtual classes, I began questioning everything. Although they certainly made a valiant effort at remote teaching, most of my professors proved too technologically inept to coerce twenty-five despondent teens to attend 8 a.m. Zoom lectures about medieval feudalism.