Blogs For Victory

Bit of news from The Pelican Post:

Academics and business leaders claim that the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA), passed last year, has not corrected the underlying problem within the student loan system. Specifically, lax lending standards and artificially low interest rates for government subsidized loans exacerbate tuition increases, while academic achievement has remained stagnant.

SAFRA eliminated federally subsidized loans, instead using all federal student loan funding for direct loans. But continued easy money policies and growing applications provide little incentive for the government or universities to keep college tuition in check…

The reason SAFRA hasn’t cured the “underlying problem” is because the “underlying problem” isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. The whole purpose behind student loans is to allow colleges and universities to charge more than the market will bear. Think of it like this: back in the past, to choose a career in education was to choose a path of genteel poverty. Every now and again an academic could strike it rich, but most of them didn’t make too much money. For most academics, this was fine..their purpose was to provide education and, in general, expand the limits of human knowledge. But right about the time the baby boomers started to enter college careers, it all changed. All of a sudden just being a well-regarded scholar wasn’t enough…there had to be fame and fortune. But how can you get fame and fortune out of college? Its not like they make a product everyone wants and needs; the pool of customers just didn’t generate enough revenue…what to do? Presto! Student loans.

Student loans, you see, de-coupled going to school from the cost of going to school. If the students really had to pay for it, out of pocket, fewer would go – and those who did go would be more willing to take 6 or 7 years to get a degree rather than rush it through in 4 years. Right now, the most irresponsible person imaginable – an 18 year old kid – is placed in front of a college admissions sales rep (that is what they really are) and told all of the wonderful things which will come his way if he gets a college degree…and don’t worry about paying for it, you can just sign here and you’ll have a loan. And you don’t have to start paying back the loan until after you graduate. And don’t worry about that payback thing, because our college graduates earn, on average, $100,000 per year! It all sounds so good…and how is an 18 year old to fight against that? Heck, for his whole life in primary school he has been told that college is the thing you must do…now its being offered to him, with no initial pain and with bright pictures painted of the future.

Left out of the sales pitch are such things as the fact that if, on average, the graduates make 100 grand a year, this means that half the graduates make less than that. Older, warier people realize this…but, then again, we’re not the one’s being recruited in to college. Also left out of it is the fact that an 18 year old will very likely live another 60 years…no rush to get a degree. Quite all right if you get it at 25 rather than 22; you don’t need to borrow money…and, hey, can’t you do at least some of the courses at the community college or other places where the cost is vastly reduced? Such bits of wisdom are not imparted – they would, in fact, blow the whole scam.

The scam requires an ever larger number of kids being conned in to borrowing an ever higher amount of money to pay for the product. If the colleges can’t keep this up, then a whole lot of professors, administrators and various edu-crat parasites will have to be let go or suffer pay cuts (and so desperately do the people in education fight for their place at the trough that they’ll accuse a Republican of murder if he proposes spending cuts). And, guess what?, know what happened last year? Well, Uncle Sam took the whole shebang over. That’s right – as kids are suckered in to borrowing ever more money in order to obtain education which may or may not provide a high income, they’ll be owing ever more money to the government. Money which can never be discharged in bankruptcy, by the way – and that is no matter how broke the kids wind up.

This is the creation of a class of people who will be both dependent upon government and servile to same. After all, start bucking government demands and you might not get the student loans you have been convinced you need. Worse, if you worked out a payment plan in order to bear the burden of the debts you wracked up, how would you like to put that payment plan at risk by complaining about government policies?

There is a solution to this – cancel the student loan program. First off, it will free up the kids from potential government tyranny. Secondly, by taking away the the easy money aspect of higher education it will force colleges to reduce tuition charges. Finally, by making the kids directly pay for college (or, at least, by forcing them to earn scholarships) it will make the education more valuable to them – they will cease taking so many “soft” courses which allow you to cruise through school but don’t have much economic application post-college. We’ll get a higher percentage of graduates being doctors and engineers, fewer being students of post-feminist deconstruction theory or whatever garbage it is they’re pushing these days. An added benefit to all this that those who teach in the “soft” courses will be cut down in number and lose influence – and those are the hard-core leftists who have polluted education and made it anti-intellectual, anti-American and anti-human in character.

Whether or not we’ll have the courage to do this remains to be seen. After all, if you propose this you’ll be painted as “anti-education”. This is because liberals have set the terms of debate here – the only way to be pro-education is to agree to spend ever more money on it. But as soon as someone shows some guts and goes ahead and does it, the change will happen. Education costs will come down, education quality will go up, there will be less debt upon our people…all sorts of good things will come, all sorts of bad things will end. And the person or party who does it will reap the reward…but only if they show the initial courage.