Higher education has become an expensive trap for young people in America, a panelist at the International Students for Liberty Conference said Friday.
Logan Albright from FreedomWorks spoke about education during the “It Sucks to be Young: 4 Ways the Government Screws America’s Youth” panel and he explained how the Obama administration’s focus on college degrees and the current system for student loans have worked together to lead to rampant student loan debt and higher unemployment for millennials.
“You have the president going on television and giving the State of the Union address, saying college has never been more important. Everyone needs to get a college education. We’re going to make that happen.’..Now when the president says everyone needs a college degree, demand goes up. Everyone knows what happens then, prices go up,” Albright said. “…In order to help everyone get a college degree the government is subsidizing student loans.”
Essentially, the government has created a cycle of increasing costs and growing debt for students because they are singularly focused on raising the number of students who obtain that oh-so-valuable piece of paper known as a college degree.
Student debt now sits at over $1.3 trillion and the President Obama’s “generous” student loan program that let graduates pay back less on their loans ended up costing taxpayers $22 billion this year, the largest shortfall from a government credit program ever.
“And yet, they continue to push these student loans. They don’t care how much it costs. They are going to do it anyway,” Albright said.
Colleges are also going to keep raising prices, he said. With an ever-growing demand and free-flowing money, there is no reason not to.
But this push for four-year degrees is part of the reason so many young people can’t find jobs, Albright said. Their skill sets don’t match up to what the market actually needs.
“This student loan program is a distortion in the economy. It’s preventing people from matching up with skills employers need. People can’t find welders, they can’t find engineers, because everyone is going into French poetry,” he said.
Obama’s plan for “free” community college will only exacerbate this problem, Albright believes.
“You are artificially increasing demand for this one specialized service. It’s going to increase the cost of community college as community colleges are able to get more subsidized dollars. And it’s directing all these people into a program that may not be right for them and distorting the market signal,” he said.
Young people must find a way to break the student loan cycle before it completely mirrors the 2008 housing market crash, although Albright fears that it might come to that.
“We shouldn’t believe the government when they tell us that everybody needs a college degree,” Albright said. “Everybody doesn’t need a college degree. Everyone doesn’t need the same education. Everyone doesn’t need to follow the same path. There are lots of different paths to success and we should follow those, not the government student loan program.”
The “It Sucks to be Young: 4 Ways the Government Screws America’s Youth” panel also included panelists Julie Borowski from FreedomWorks and Peter Suderman from Reason. In addition to education, they touched on three other ways the government screws millennials — Obamacare, entitlement programs and civil liberties.
