Vice president Joe Biden will be in Norfolk next week to talk about how the Obama administration is going to contain the rising costs of higher education. With student loan debt now topping $1 trillion, these costs are, indeed, a major concern for students, parents and anyone else who has co-signed the loan.
But the President’s proposed “Blueprint for Keeping College Affordable and Within Reach for All Americans” isn’t the way to do it. Even the normally White House-friendly Center for American Progress has taken issue with the administration’s blueprint, largely because it would add even more student loan debt to the already massive pile:
He’d boost campus-based Perkins loans and target the increase to schools taking steps to slow the growth of tuition. Translation: more student debt, administered in ways that may at the margins reward colleges that have had smaller price increases than others.
That’s not exactly a recipe for making college more affordable.
Curtailing costs is a bipartisan cul de sac. Both sides tend to think that more aid, via loans or budget lines items, will do the trick. Cato’s Neal McCluskey has a very different take:
While the evidence is not conclusive, it appears that the additional spending and the additional students and degrees it has helped to fund do not ultimately constitute a net societal gain. Instead, all the coerced, thirdparty support has likely produced several damaging, unintended consequences: credential inflation, sky-high noncompletion rates, and rampant tuition inflation. In other words, the money taken from taxpayers, in total and on an individual basis, to “invest” in higher education has been on the rise, and it appears to be hurting both taxpayers individually and society as a whole. We have taken money from people who would have used it more efficiently than has the system to which it was given.
Don’t look for Biden, or anyone else, make such an heretical statement.
