Student loan debt is a problem, but we won’t see the $50,000 in relief that liberals want anytime soon.
It’s a regressive proposal that disproportionately benefits the wealthy. In his town hall event with CNN on Tuesday, President Biden made clear that he does not support the $50,000 figure. But this isn't to say the issue is closed. Conservatives can also offer solutions to the student debt problem. For a start, we should start identifying the big problem of students being forced into buying more than they need.
If we can agree that the purpose of college for most students is to better their job prospects in the future, then it’s easy to see where cuts can be made. The most obvious: Stop forcing people to take unnecessary classes.
An associate’s degree in the United States usually takes two years to complete. Meanwhile, it usually takes four years to get a bachelor’s degree. However, schools oftentimes require students to take classes that have absolutely nothing to do with their major. How is that good for the students? They have to pay for those classes and textbooks and lose time out of their life. If someone wants to go to college for journalism (not that everyone needs a journalism degree to be a journalist), then they should learn journalism and the skills associated with it. They should not have to take algebra, history, religion, gender studies, or something else that’s not relevant. Forcing students to take electives and general education courses makes the process take longer and drives up the cost.
In many European countries, it normally takes three years to get a bachelor’s degree because the schools are major-oriented; they cut out classes less relevant to the major. In theory, if more schools here offered three-year bachelor’s degree programs and three-semester associate’s degree programs, people could pay 25% less for a degree and have it be about as useful, if not more useful, in that students would have more time to focus on additional readings relevant to their specific areas of study.
There are colleges out there with some three-year degree programs, such as Ball State, Kent State, or University of Massachusetts Amherst. The reason Kent State developed a three-year degree program is because then-Ohio Republican Gov. John Kasich required that state schools offer them. Other states can learn from that.
There are other places in the college system in which people pay for things they don’t need.
One is bloated administrative staffs. As Republican Rep. Greg Murphy has noted, college administrative costs increased by 61% between 1993 and 2007. Instructional costs increased 39% over the same period.
Athletics are another issue. Although some think of college sports as schools exploiting athletes, it’s more like schools exploiting their students to benefit coaches and athletes. Aside from many NCAA Division I men’s basketball and football teams, college athletics don’t make money. They lose millions of dollars for their respective schools each year. In some cases, schools charge every student more than $1,000 per year in athletic fees to fund these programs. That's more than $4,000 in waste for a bachelor’s degree.
Introducing reforms at the state and university levels, the price of college would drop to more affordable levels. And it would happen without costing taxpayers a dime. True, there are other ways to lower costs, such as getting the federal government out of the loan industry, allowing people to discharge student loan debt in bankruptcy, and making more textbooks and readings available online. Still, we shouldn't ignore the fact that limited government solutions to this problem exist. It's time conservatives stop ceding the issue of affordable higher education.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a freelance writer who has been published with USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other media outlets.
