By Ari Kaufman,
Conservatives and common-sense Americans cheered last month when the Supreme Court correctly ruled that Joe Biden’s abominable attempt to “forgive” $430 billion in college debt for over 25 million borrowers was unlawful.
The White House plan was purely unconstitutional and insulting to Americans. Legislation that Congress designed for a small number of military members in the wake of 9/11 should not be applied to a large portion of the population two decades later.
It was also regressive, robbing blue-collar workers who saved their money and giving to wealthier doctors, lawyers, and teachers. Biden engaged in left-wing class warfare on behalf of the affluent. Or, as Senate Leader Mitch McConnell said, a way for Biden to “pad the pockets of his high-earning base and make suckers out of working families.”
Knowing that transferring college debt can lure ignorant young voters in 2024, Team Biden attempted a political scam to transform attending college from bettering your future prospects through learning to partisan political allegiance. The effort was appalling.
Student debt doled out by schools, and the government is indeed abusive; however, the problem with Biden’s plan is that, like many callous liberal ideas, it does nothing to stop the problem and instead sets a precedent that presidents can erase large portions of student debt.
The result of our student-debt system is spiraling college inflation. I’ve written extensively about the desperate need to trim university bloat. The cost of college has long outstripped future incomes and has made all those dubious statistics people spew about the monetary value of a degree into lies.
What have colleges done with this influx of cash? Start with Harvard and Yale.
In the last 35 years, Harvard’s tuition has seen a 90% increase in adjusted dollars. Has the school grown its faculty and course offerings to match that increase? No. It dramatically expanded its population of administrators. Harvard now employs over 7,000 full-time administrators. That’s more people than the school’s entire undergraduate population and three times the number of faculty members.
Most administrators take large salaries and benefits while contributing little, especially in the odious DEI realm.
Over at Yale in the last two decades, they went from five vice presidents to an astounding 31, while many administrative units during that same time saw a 150% increase in size, with surging salaries.
Where formerly a school might have a small department overseeing something like the annual course catalog, the catalog cannot even be produced now without meetings about who will manage the school’s logos or advise on the “diversity and inclusion” represented in the photographs. We see the creation and perpetual endowment of ideological jobs for the professional-managerial class on campus. It hurts everyone.
These useless administrators are the actual beneficiaries of the student debt-forgiveness program. Have Biden, delusional Chuck Schumer, or any Democrat pointed this out when ranting gibberish about student loans?
It should be the goal of conservatives to institute rapid college-tuition deflation and remove useless administrators. This deflation would benefit everyone, perhaps even progressives. After all, even as Democrats move hard left, do liberals not wish to see doctors and lawyers graduating with a manageable debt load so that they can choose service-oriented work in poorer communities?
And while we’re at it, let’s balance the government benefits given to college students with what inexplicably is not given to high school graduates who eschew Big Academia and decide another path in life is more productive.
