Take it from someone who’s paying off her student loans: College is way too expensive, especially considering how little the degrees financially benefit graduates. The average salary of a college graduate this year, for example, is about $55,000. That’s not a bad number at all — unless you’re one of the many, many college students who expects to make $103,000 right out of college.
Perhaps these bloated salary expectations are why so many young adults feel comfortable taking on tens of thousands of dollars in debt to pay for their higher education. Or maybe they feel they have no other choice, since the message has been made clear by both our parents and grandparents that college is non-negotiable and that the only way to succeed is to earn that degree.
Regardless, there’s no question that student loan debt in the United States is a crisis. The cumulative federal student loan debt is now about $1.6 trillion, which is a massive burden on taxpayers, whether they know it or not, with a little under a quarter of the 14 million borrowers in default.
But what’s the solution? The Biden administration seems to think the best way to ease the crisis is to “cancel” it. The president announced this week a proposal to cancel $10,000 in student loan debt for those making less than $125,000 per year. It doesn’t seem to bother him that this plan would disproportionately benefit high-earners and wealthy families or that it would be a massive middle finger to those who already worked to pay off their debt. All Biden knows is that he wants to be the guy with the solution, no matter how economically and politically foolish it might be.
If the Biden administration really wanted to provide a solution to the high cost of higher education, it would crack down on the universities that have price-gouged their way into comfortable profits. Over the last 40 years, tuition has risen by more than 174%. That’s what happens when an oligopoly realizes it has complete and total control over the demand for higher education. They can, and they will, charge as much as they want for it — because, at the end of the day, they’re not on the line for the price tag. The federal government is.
