Part 4: Moral Problems With Student Loan Forgiveness Student loan forgiveness also suffers from a variety of moral problems. Forgiveness Pursued for the Explicit Purpose of Benefiting Certain Sexes or Races Is Wrong Many advocates for student loan forgiveness are explicit that a main motivation for them is the argument that forgiveness would disproportionately benefit...
Part 3: Economic Problems With Student Loan Forgiveness Student loan forgiveness also suffers from several economic problems. Forgiveness Is Expensive and Has a High Opportunity Cost The first economic problem with student loan forgiveness is that it is expensive, using vast sums of money that could be used for more pressing needs. Current and former...
Part 2: Educational Problems With Student Loan Forgiveness The next category of problems with student loan forgiveness focuses on the educational problems it would create or exacerbate. As noted above, most students borrow reasonable amounts that they can repay. But some students do have unaffordable student loan debt. Yet this problematic debt is a symptom....
Part 1: Logical and Rhetorical Problems With Student Loan Forgiveness We begin with the logical and rhetorical problems of student loan forgiveness. Advocates Overstate the Problem The first logical problem is that loan forgiveness proponents overstate the problem. To start with, not all college students take out student loans. In fact, most undergraduate students do...
Accreditors serve as key gatekeepers in higher education. Without accreditation, a college’s students are not eligible to receive federal financial aid such as Pell grants and student loans. This gives accreditors a fairly unique status—private entities that can determine if taxpayer dollars flow to a college. Given that accreditors have this power bestowed upon them...
This week marks the final round of the U.S. Department of Education’s negotiated rulemaking session addressing the critical issue of accountability in higher education. One of the issues under consideration is the Gainful Employment Rule, an Obama-era regulation that sought to strengthen accountability in higher education. Gainful Employment tried to identify college programs where students...
Federal lawmakers are at it again, agitating for the federal government to forgive literally trillions of dollars of student loan debt. The recent letter from congressional Democrats calls for the continuation of the student loan payment pause. There are many reasons why this is a bad idea, but the conversation does raise another set of...
Andrew Ratley got some good news earlier this month; the law school he’s attended since 2019 gained full accreditation. That means the legal education he’s invested years—and thousands of dollars—into will soon allow him to become a lawyer. The American Bar Association, after years of study (and no small amount of controversy) finally gave the...
I borrowed over $30,000 for college, and after many years of repayment, I am now officially (student loan) debt-free. By a bizarre twist of fate, much of my professional life has been devoted to studying financial aid programs like student loans. In this essay, I reflect back on how my student loan experience compares to...
Last week, the U.S. Department of Education announced new changes to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program. The changes make a bad program worse. PSLF was launched in 2007 and provides accelerated loan forgiveness for politically favored workers. Other college graduates with student loan debt need to make payments for at least 20 years before qualifying...
Details are starting to emerge about the Biden administration’s plans for free community college. According to a story in Inside Higher Ed by Alexis Gravely, the key details include: States that opt-in must set community college tuition and fees to $0 and must maintain current spending on community colleges. To offset the loss of tuition, the federal government...
With President Joe Biden in the White House, progressives are pushing for universal student loan forgiveness. New data from the Department of Education provides an excellent snapshot of how badly targeted student loan forgiveness would be. This new data gives us the most detailed view into the roughly $86 billion in student loans taken out by students who graduated...