President Biden said in a speech on Wednesday that he has been able to put forth a student debt relief plan despite the Supreme Court ruling against him.
After the Supreme Court struck down President Joe Biden’s vote-buying proxy, student debt relief program, his administration came up with a complex program called SAVE in an effort to try to push loan forgiveness through.
Biden took to social media to proclaim, "Starting today, the first round of folks who are enrolled in our SAVE student loan repayment plan who have paid their loans for 10 years and borrowed $12,000 or less will have their debt canceled," which he estimated would impact more than 150,000 people.
There are a lot of things wrong with this, in addition to Biden’s consistent attempts to ignore our Constitution, including a couple of big elephants in the room.
US STUDENTS ARE PUTTING OFF COLLEGE DECISIONS DUE TO DELAY IN FINANCIAL AID APPLICATIONS
The first is that if you have attended college and that education does not give you the tools and skills to pay back $12,000 plus interest over a 10-year period (yes, 10 years, or $1,200 per year plus interest), what value is college? It has failed you.
Student loan borrowers stage a rally in front of The White House to celebrate President Biden canceling student debt. The Biden administration has already quietly forgiven billions in student loan debt. (Paul Morigi/Getty Images for We the 45m)
That leads to the second issue set, which encompasses the fundamentally broken college system, alongside the broken college lending system.
Many people like to throw around the assertion that having an educated population is valuable. But that assertion needs context. First, how is a person being "educated"?
In today’s education system, if young people come out of their universities, many of which today resemble hedge funds with indoctrination camps attached, without the skills to understand compound interest and with antisemitic or communist beliefs, both of which have been rising among young people, that’s not valuable, that’s detrimental.
If young people go to college for a better job and then take the same type of jobs they could have obtained without college, then no, it’s not valuable.
Getting a better paying job is only valuable if the return on investment is there. To get a slightly higher paying job in exchange for six-figures worth of debt, or a job that doesn’t produce an appropriate return, is not valuable.
Lifelong learning of important skills and information can be quite valuable, depending on the cost to acquire those skills. Today, with abundant access to information, you don’t need college. You can acquire truly valuable knowledge at low to no cost.
One of my X followers reminded me of the quote from Good Will Hunting about Harvard, when Will said, "you spent $150,000 on an education you could have got for $1.50 in late charges at the public library."
Additionally, we have a deep need for trade workers and other professions that don’t require a college education, many of which pay very well and produce a lot of value for society, which doesn’t get enough focus.
President Joe Biden speaks about student loan cancellation and support for students and borrowers, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on October 4, 2023. (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
So, a college education is not valuable at every price. Which brings us to the broken college lending system.
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Neither Biden nor any other influential politician in office is addressing the root cause of the student loan burden, which is government. Forgiveness doesn’t make college more appropriately priced. It does the opposite.
As the government took over the large part of student lending and disallowed bankruptcy, there has been an ongoing and increasing transfer of wealth from young people to the colleges and universities.
One of my X followers reminded me of the quote from Good Will Hunting about Harvard, when Will said, "you spent $150,000 on an education you could have got for $1.50 in late charges at the public library."
As I cover in detail in my book, "You Will Own Nothing," to create actual and lasting relief from crushing student loans, the government needs to get out of student lending, allow student loans to be underwritten and discharged in bankruptcy, and make colleges have skin in the game.
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Colleges already benefit from nonprofit status and almost a quarter of a trillion dollars received from the government at the federal and state levels. To receive those benefits, the colleges need to be restructured to stop taking advantage of young people and deliver a reasonable return on a young person’s education investment.
But the bigger issue is that colleges don’t seem that valuable or necessary anymore. They aren’t teaching the skills young people need to succeed. They are basically robbing them and creating legions of non-critical thinking conformists-- and that definitely is not good for American society.
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Carol Roth is a former investment banker, entrepreneur and author of the new book "You Will Own Nothing" Broadside Books. Her previous books are "The War on Small Business" and the New York Times bestseller "The Entrepreneur Equation."
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