I’ve banged on Erick Erickson enough times that finding myself in agreement with him – if only in response, if not in the theoretical underpinnings – leaves me with a bit of a squirm. The piece is entitled, “Why Is College So Expensive?” He, of course, can’t help but see everything through his prism:
Specifically, the Biden administration doesn’t want to have that conversation [about banning student loans]. The left doesn’t either. Why? Because academics are their constituent base. Essentially, the student loan industry props up a large and almost universally consolidating base of Democratic voters called professors.
If you keep the student loan industry going, and then you bail out the students, the money continues to flow to the academic intuitions that provide you a reliable pool of elite, white voters for the Democratic Party. They don’t want to meaningfully deal with student loans or the rising cost of tuition. Instead, they would rather have the American taxpayers bail out the people who got loans for degrees in professional victimology and can’t pay them back.
Because that pool is so … big? Without checking, I rather doubt that there’s a substantial imbalance in the political leanings of new college graduates, enough to tip the country into a Democratic stranglehold.
But that thought appeals to conservative cant, so he tosses that in as he’s now a conservative thought leader.
But this is what I proposed, if only as an experiment, years ago, if not quite so hyperbolicly as does Erickson:
If we’re going to have a discussion about college tuition inflation, we’re not having a real discussion until we get to the student loan market. The solution is not to bail out students, the solution is to ban student loans. If we got rid of student loan programs, you would see a remarkable collapse in college tuition in this country.
Getting rid of the student loan industry would force colleges and universities to scale back to reality. Everyone in higher-ed would be outraged and claim many schools would go out of business. Would that happen? Yes and good riddance. The fewer academic incubators for ignorance, the better. But we don’t want to have that conversation.
Perhaps the for-profit schools would go under. Some marginal institutions might also disappear, or be forced to reform various financial practices. And I don’t appreciate the politically motivated bile.
But long-time readers know that I’ve addressed the topic of tuition subsidies before, and identified the freeloading component of society, riding the backs of students, poor and rich alike, to be … society. Society is an entity in and of itself, defined by its network effects between members, and it benefits from having highly educated citizens. The less it contributes to ameliorating the costs of college, the more it is a freeloading institution: an inverse correlation.
And Erickson misses that key, critical part completely. As does most everyone else.
