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Donald Trump and Student Loans

This column has written many times, in vain, about student loans, beginning here on May 8, 2014, with “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Student Debt Has Got to Go!” but Republicans have yet to pull the fast one on the Democrats that was recommended in the columns.

However good an idea student loans may have been in the beginning, they have become a scam. That was probably inevitable: Washington produces scams the way cows produce manure—though we must pause to note that cow manure can be far more beneficial than Washington legislation.

Student loans were a two-step scam: first, the government proposed cheap loans (yea!); then, when students, having learned nothing useful in college, were suffering under mind-boggling debt, the government proposed to forgive the loans (yea!). “Yea!” unless you’re a taxpayer, and perhaps one who didn’t go to college or who did go to college on borrowed funds and then paid off the loan yourself. Then you’ve been had. If you object, you’re a racist (but you’re probably a racist anyway).

Actually, and not surprisingly, there is evidence that student loans cause tuition rates not just to go up but to go up faster than the amount of the loans.

President Biden has been proposing cancelling student loans for almost his entire presidency. He’s even been smacked down by the Supreme Court, but that just doesn’t seem to faze him. He just does it again—while, at the same time, saying Donald Trump will be a dictator! You can’t make this stuff up. So far, Biden’s loan forgiveness has cost more than $100 billion.

Donald Trump should steal a march on Biden: he should propose forgiving all student loans for people making less than, say, $40,000 a year (if you don’t like that amount, pick another) and—this is the important part—cancel all support for higher education in order to pay for the loan cancellation. Cancelling federal aid to higher education would save billions!

If canceling aid to all colleges seems too radical, he could propose canceling aid to those colleges that have huge, or perhaps only large, endowments.

People who didn’t go to college could feel rightly aggrieved at the windfall the college debtors receive, but they—and indeed the whole country—could benefit from ending the college support scam.

Many, and probably most, of the bad ideas that afflict this country have come from the academy. Defunding those institutions is a giant step toward sanity.

Trump could make a big deal out of stopping the gravy train to colleges. The lefties will howl, of course, and their howling will seem like a cheering section for candidate Trump.

And it’s true that a lot of high-paid administrators and grievance counselors at all those colleges will lose their jobs. What will they do then? Become baristas? That alone may be worth the effort.

There are several points to understand about college. The first, and probably most important, is that most students learn absolutely nothing in college. Bryan Caplan in The Case Against Education reports that “barely half of American adults know the earth goes around the sun.” (Read that again, slowly.)

In their book, Academically Adrift, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa essentially agree with Caplan: “American education is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students.” How could that be? They explain: “On average, [students] report spending only 12 hours per week studying.” And “fifty percent of the students in our sample reported that they had not taken a single course during the prior semester that required more than twenty pages of writing, and one third had not taken one that required even forty pages of reading per week.”

So: a college graduate winds up as a barista, making whatever baristas make, but it’s not nearly enough to pay off four years’ of loans taking such courses as “LGBT2290: Introduction to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies” at—wait for it—Cornell! (Look it up!)

A second point to understand is that student loans have fueled the huge increase in administrative costs. Forbes reports that “between 1976 and 2018, full-time administrators and other professionals employed by those institutions increased by 164 percent and 452 percent, respectively.” And that “there are now three times as many administrators and other professionals… as there are faculty (on a per-student basis) at the leading schools in the country.” That’s ridiculous.

Why go to college? The answer is not to learn anything but only to get credentialed. College graduates earn more than twice as much as students who complete only one, two, or three years combined! But how can that be if they don’t know the earth goes around the sun?

Trump will have a field day, making that point over and over again. And again! We should find other ways to credential young people—as they do in other countries—and stop rich people from getting their loans paid off by poor people. The pointy-headed intellectuals won’t like it, but they don’t plan to vote for Trump anyway.

The new mantra, short enough for bumper stickers, can be: “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, College Support Has to Go!”

Daniel Oliver is Chairman of the Board of the Education and Research Institute and a Director of Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco. In addition to serving as Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under President Reagan, he was Executive Editor and subsequently Chairman of the Board of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review.

Email Daniel Oliver at Daniel.Oliver@TheCandidAmerican.com.

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About Daniel Oliver

Daniel Oliver is chairman of the board of the Education and Research Institute and a director of the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco. In addition to serving as chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under President Reagan, he was executive editor and subsequently chairman of the board of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review. Email him at Daniel.Oliver@TheCandidAmerican.com.

Notable Replies

  1. I once enrolled in a class at the University of California, a black studies course required for graduation. This was in the early ‘70s, so I fortunately missed being surrounded by the redundancy of “supportive” staff. The course involved ONE meeting of the class with the professor, at the beginning of the quarter at which the professor explained the course requirements. Each student was to write a term paper, which would then be submitted to our TA. That was it. We never saw the professor again and it was the easiest A I ever received. Other than that class I actually learned a few things.

  2. Avatar for task task says:

    The Department of Education, created by Jimmy Carter in 1979, should have been anticipated by those already educated, as something more than unnecessary, not because the intention, at least by those that had good intentions, wasn’t, at least superficially, good, but because it was dangerous… inherently so. Yes, it is good for the nation’s youth to become smarter and share common values. All countries, including those run by dictators, such as N. Korea, Cuba and China educate their youth to become as exceptional as possible so why not the same for America? After all Americans, prior to the creation of the ED, had already provided all students with educations so superior that the graduates ranked number one in science and math among industrialized nations. And I’m not underscoring literacy because, although the results were not quite as exceptional, Americans were still comparatively very well educated. However, according to a Business Insider report in 2018, the U.S. ranked 38th in math scores and 24th in science. And, furthermore, the cost of such excellence, was once a pittance compared to what it is today. Costs have risen dramatically to produce far less educated students as demonstrated by test scores. How did this happen? And why so rapidly? And most of all was there an alternative agenda far different than the reasons given to create the Department?

    Certainly students, despite many coming from disadvantaged and even dysfunctional families, encumbered by language, which is no small issue, are not different from students in prior generations, which, nevertheless, grew up to be leaders, CEOs and professionals. Many, even without a formal education, ran and still do, extremely successful businesses. So that leaves us wondering about the educators, the educational programs and their intentions. As a side note consider that before segregation was determined, by the Warren Court, to be everything but Separate and Equal, black minority students were better educated in black schools with black professors than they currently are in integrated schools. Many were educated, at the K12 level, better than many of nation’s white majority.

    Many decades ago I was temporarily bemused by the forward in Hayek’s second edition to his “Road to Serfdom”. It serendipitously provided a clue and a forewarning regarding the danger of any centralized educational authoritarian institution in America. After the first addition the reaction by the American public was far different than that of the European public’s. The Europeans, and most notably the British, whether purposefully or not, did not embrace economic social planning until after WW II . They were, warned by Hayek, to restore a less authoritarian, less planned approach based upon individual liberty, after the war where centralized economic planning had been used to manage the war. History has shown that the British did not heed the advice. History also revealed something else. America, a country founded upon individual liberty, was infested with Marxist trained ideologues whose very purpose was to influence generations of youth. The McCarthy hearings were not without evidence of purpose. And also, under the radar, in the forward of the second edition of Hayek’s masterful work there was also evidence. Hayek, in that forward addressed the outrage, American socialists exhibited after reading the first edition of his “Road to Serfdom”. European socialists argued dispassionately with little to no outrage.

    American socialists were armed and ready to do what Marxist ideologues do wherever they reside. They look to control the levers of power and the education of a nation’s youth. What better vehicle could have been created to facilitate their hopes, dreams, aspirations and intentions than a centralized bureaucracy? Hence the creation of the Department of Education was a milestone to Marxists and became Millstone for students. For ideologues it was the very intention.

    The educational institutions in America are designed to indoctrinate first and educate last. It is why the AMA and legal profession are resplendent with Marxists. Americans have been educated right through to K12, and then beyond, to think DEI and Woke deliberately and told to trust the planners. Were not parents surprised during the Covid lockdowns when they observed what their children were being taught using their computers, while at home, during the lockdowns? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes (Who will guard the guards themselves)?

    There is nothing Constitutional about a big intrusive government with vast authoritarian powers. The American Republic was Constitutionally crafted to sanctify and protect the individual from such governments. In opposition to original intentions are the educational bureaucracies. The very purpose of today’s educational institutions, over and above even those designed to provide needed professional licensure, is to indoctrinate Americans to abandon their individual liberty and accept, under the guise of the “Common Good”, a planned globalist agenda. Ask yourself who is at the top and what part of what they inflict upon everyone else they ascribe to for themselves? Karl Marx Could never have imagined how successful his philosophical aspirations would become except for the fact that he had two of his very germane principles very wrong. His revolution did not start with any proletariat but at the top. And it neither eliminated or made life better for those least fortunate. What it did was prevent people, under the power and threat of law, to help themselves. Paradoxically, such governments thrive by making more of those needing government and controls them far better than even a King, such as George III, ever did.

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