President Joe Biden announced this week that he plans to circumvent Congress to forgive some student loan debt.
The plan would offer up to $10,000 in student loan debt relief for those making under $125,000 per year ($250,000 for a household), while Pell Grant recipients are eligible for up to $20,000 in debt cancellation.
As a 25-year-old who attended an expensive private liberal arts college in Boston and carries about $4,000 in federal student loan debt, I’m in the constituency the administration is pandering to with this move.
And yet I see it as a colossal waste of money. I know I don’t need the government’s help to pay off these student loans — and others don’t either.
I decided to attend Emerson College in Boston, which now costs about $75,000 per year before aid. The government never forced me to attend this school. In fact, the government provided me with less expensive state college and university options.
Had I attended one of those state schools instead of Emerson College, I would most likely have had no student loan debt before this announcement. And thankfully, $4,000 is not a crushing debt. But much of this comes down to the decisions young adults make. Not everyone chooses, as I did, to attend an expensive school. Many more choose not to go to college at all. And, sometimes, those who choose to go don’t take higher education seriously, opting to spend their student loans on drugs, alcohol, and spring break vacations. Why should those who willingly saddled themselves with debt get a government bailout, and those who worked hard to pay off their bills or chose not to take on that debt don’t?
I’ve made sacrifices to ensure I have money to pay bills. That includes working more than one full-time job and just about every day of the year.
Yet, if I worked less hard and made less of an effort to pay down my loan, I would receive more money from the government. Some non-Pell Grant recipients will receive two-and-a-half times the amount of money I’m receiving. And many people have paid off their entire student loan debt with no help from the government at all.
To make matters worse, Biden’s legally questionable move does nothing to address the real problem, which is the deliberately inflated cost of higher education. Biden isn’t offering a reform to the higher education system to control costs, although he very well could. Instead, he wants to hand the professional class a $300 billion bailout. Soon enough, every Democrat hoping to win the White House someday will propose to do the same thing.
And meanwhile, colleges will continue to get more expensive as universities realize they’re not on the hook for jacked-up costs. Over the past several years, college prices have risen at three times the rate of inflation.
No matter how economically and politically foolish this policy might be, Democrats won’t be content to stop here. A number of progressives, such as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), have called on the Biden administration to go even further and wipe out $50,000 in student loan debt per borrower, without income restrictions.
Be prepared for liberal politicians to try to waste a lot of your money paying other people’s college bills instead of fighting the root of high college costs. Throwing money at the problem is easier, even though it’s less effective.
Tom Joyce ( @TomJoyceSports ) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts.
