On social media, I keep seeing liberals getting excited about Biden giving $10,000—$20,000 to college grads making less than $100,000 or so. This is an insult.
College costs have spiraled out of control for decades. It is orders of magnitude more expensive than when I went to college in the late 80s/early 90s, and the costs when I went to college were far higher than they were in the days when Baby Boomers were going to college.
While there are a variety of causes of this, one of the big causes is college administrators giving themselves exorbitant salaries, and simultaneously increasing the number of administrators at colleges. This increases costs severely enough to push adjunct professors into qualifying for food stamps, and leaving college graduates with ever-increasing debt burdens. The other factors are things we have less control over, but this part of it was done quite deliberately by the bureaucrats who run colleges. Professors and students pay a heavy price for their greed.
The Magnitude of the Debt
The average private tuition costs in my state of Illinois is $35,570. It is not uncommon for people to graduate college with 6-figure debt. Once you factor in interest, people pay many times that before they get out of debt. Back when I was in college, the average was around $10,000 or so, and that was enough to saddle me with debt for a very long time. I can't imagine what young people today are going through with much higher student debt and wages that have stagnated relative to inflation since before my time.
A lot of older people (especially my age and older) do not grasp how outrageous this increase in college costs have been over the years. According to the previous link, average private school tuition was $1,417 in the year 1968-1969. In the year 2019-2020, that number is $32,769. That is an increase of 2,312.6% over the course of 51 years. During that same time period, inflation increased by around 734.7%. College tuition increased around three times as fast as inflation, mostly because of college administrators stuffing their pockets.
Against the massive amount of debt modern college graduates are saddled with, $10,000 is a joke. A sick joke.
Against the massive amount of debt modern college graduates are saddled with, $10,000 is a joke. A sick joke. $10,000 would not have been enough to cover the interest from my two years in private university back in the early 1990s. It would have made very little difference in the time it took me to pay off my debts from three decades ago. Now, it would be less than a minor dent in what modern students owe.
To treat this as a great accomplishment that genuinely helps modern college students is an insult. It is less than theater. It is less than performance art. Establishment Democrats deserve no credit for this performative gesture. Worse, their inadequate regulation did nothing to address any of the causes of college costs spiraling out of control, so the problem is going to continue to get worse, even after this meaningless gesture.
Means-Testing Makes it Worse
On top of the insultingly low amount of assistance being offered, they are making things worse by adding means-testing to the whole thing. Means-testing in general is incredibly wasteful. It adds enormous administrative costs. You need to hire a lot of people to make sure people qualify for the government program in question, so that they can examine and file paperwork showing that this or that person qualifies. That costs a lot of money. Money that would be better spent on the program in question in many cases.
I spent years helping people fill out forms for the LIHEAP program that helps poor elderly and disabled people apply for government assistance with their heating and cooling utility bills. I'm well familiar with the amount of man-hours necessary to file a single application, not to mention all the man-hours needed to double check and triple check the paperwork to make certain no one is getting help that doesn't need it. Even with a modern database, this is very labor-intensive.
There are times when means-testing makes sense. This is not one of those times. Anyone who doesn't need government help isn't taking out loans to pay for college in the first place. Means-testing for helping people with college loans is a pointless waste of tax dollars that exists solely to fuel the debates between talking heads on those pundit shows.
We must not let Democrats get away with patting themselves on the back for a meaningless gesture that does not make a serious attempt to deal with the problems real people are facing. Republicans are even worse for suggesting that this meager help is too much.
If you think education is expensive, then you have not considered the cost of living in a society that is even dumber.