“Education is no longer a luxury,” declared President Lyndon B. Johnson in signing the Higher Education Act in 1965. Education, including higher education, “is a necessity.”
In The Debt Trap, Wall Street Journal writer Josh Mitchell explains the history of federal higher education policy and “how student loans became a national catastrophe.”
The book is worth reading, writes George Leef, but he thinks Mitchell “uncritically accepts” the idea that subsidizing “college for all” will boost productivity and lessen poverty and inequality.
Thanks to federal loans, more students went to college. Colleges raised tuition, knowing there was plenty of federal aid to cover it.
College graduates and dropouts owe more than a trillion dollars in student loans, writes Leef, editorial director of the Martin Center for Academic Renewal.
President Obama, who set a goal of becoming the nation with the highest percentage of college-educated workers, made it easier for students to repay loans, but many still “found themselves deeply in debt after graduation.”
One such student was Derek, who thought that getting a law degree would get him and his family out of poverty. He borrowed heavily to attend Charlotte Law School, a for-profit school that accepted applicants with low LSAT scores. (That’s another of the unanticipated effects of the “college for all” policies that Mitchell doesn’t address, namely that colleges accepted academically weaker and weaker students, often resulting in declining rigor and grade inflation to keep them in school.) Although some of Derek’s classmates did become lawyers, law school didn’t work out as Derek had hoped; he wound up teaching kindergarteners.
The lesson Mitchell draws is that schools must do more to “ensure” the success of their graduates. The problem is that we’ve so oversold higher education that it is impossible to ensure success. There simply aren’t enough “good” jobs for all the graduates.
Leef agrees with Mitchell on “requiring colleges to accept some of the risk if their students default, expanding postsecondary opportunities other than college, particularly apprenticeships, and to stop subsidizing grad school.”
But Leef thinks forgiving student loan interest, making community college tuition free and guaranteeing that all Americans have “access” to higher education will backfire.
