Over the next several weeks, many thousands of young people will be graduating from our colleges and universities burdened with sizeable student loan debts.
It shocks the students of today when I tell them tuition cost only $90 a quarter my freshman year at the University of Tennessee in 1965-66. I once heard House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer say it cost only $87 a semester when he started at the University of Maryland.
Students today think the federal student loan program is one of the best things that ever happened to them. Actually, it is one of the worst. Until that program started in the mid-1960s, college tuition and fees went up very slowly, roughly at the rate of inflation.
After the federal government decided to “help” students and start subsidizing these costs, tuition and fees started going up three or four times the rate of inflation almost every year.
Last year, columnist Kathleen Parker wrote that since 1985, the cost of higher education has increased 538 percent, while the consumer price index (inflation) over the same period has gone up only 121 percent.
Colleges and universities have been able to tamp down opposition to fee increases by telling students not to worry, they can just borrow the money.
When I was an undergraduate at UT and later in law school at George Washington, students could work part-time, as I always did, and pay all their college expenses. No one got out of school with a debt because of tuition and fees. Now, almost everyone does.
Now, 40,000,000 Americans owe money on student loans. Outstanding student loan debts total over $1.3 trillion. Some analysts think it may be a bubble about to burst.
Floyd Norris, writing in the International New York Times, said “student loans are creating large problems that may persist for decades. They will impoverish some borrowers and serve as a drain on economic activity.”
Hedge fund manager James Altucher has written that “we’re graduating a generation of indentured students.” Ohio University Economist Richard Vedder made a similar point several years ago in his book, appropriately titled Going Broke By Degree.
Several things could and should be done to start helping solve this problem.
Federal and state legislators, parents and even students themselves should speak out against tuition increases higher than the rate of inflation.
Colleges and universities that hold these increases down — or even lower their costs — should be given priority and rewarded in federal and state grants and appropriations.
Congress and state legislatures should hold hearings that feature people who have been victimized by heavy student loan debts at the start of their careers.
Every college or university that receives federal money (99.9 percent) should be required to give financial counseling or at least some type of simple, easy-to-understand document to every person receiving a student loan, warning about potential problems.
Last, but most important of all, federal and state governments should give incentives to schools that require professors to teach classes rather than writing for obscure journals that no one reads or doing esoteric research that produces no tangible results.
Too many professors have lost the desire to teach. They seem to think six hours a week is a heavy load. The result is that too many students cannot get the classes they need to graduate, and it is now taking five or six years to get a four-year degree.
This is a very serious, fast-growing problem that needs major reforms sooner rather than later.
John J. Duncan, Jr. has represented Tennessee’s second congressional district since 1988. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions for editorials, available at this link.
