The administration has never gotten tired of the idea that money is just something they print and so the solution to the student debt problem - which government created decades ago by declaring a college education a 'right' and making student loans unlimited - is to start forgiving student loans.
This is the wrong approach. Writing in The Atlantic, Jordan Weissmann notes Department of Education data showing that undergraduate tuition at public colleges for the entire United States was under $63 billion.
That sounds like a lot of money but the Federal government spent $69 billion on Pell Grants, tax breaks and work study funding - and that's without another $107 billion in student loans being factored into government cost. Basically, if college was just made free, taxpayers could save money - and maybe even more, since those rather sketchy schools that advertise on TV all of the time would not be able to get Federal loan money.
Link: The Atlantic
For that much savings, we don't even need to cap salaries union-style, so the 18th lowest-paid researcher in just one department at a public college can still make $107,000 - while he sits in a foreign jail. And if we need to reduce costs further, we could pay higher education the same way we pay public school teachers - on a union scale. If there is one thing a lot of academics dislike, it is that terrible Republican capitalism and meritocracy they have to endure, right?
