How the U.S. Government Could End the Student Debt Crisis Today [View all]

[eridani]

http://www.nationofchange.org/2014/11/13/u-s-government-end-student-debt-crisis-today/

Instead of loaning students money, the federal government could just pay for their tuition, without causing any significant economic problems.

Last month, Lower Saxony became the final state in Germany to abolish tuition for all students at public universities. Meanwhile, in the United States, student loan debt has passed the $1 trillion mark. The burden is now becoming increasingly heavy for middle-class and wealthy students, but especially for those from lower-income backgrounds. This injustice has spurred many organizations, like the Occupy Wall Street offshoot Strike Debt, to do what they can to pay off student debt on their own.

The student-debt status quo taxes borrowers while doing less and less to subsidize social mobility.

Borrowers could use the support of their government, but U.S. policymakers don’t seem to see student debt through the same moral lens as officials in many other countries do. Can you imagine Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, for example, arguing that “Tuition fees are socially unjust,” as German member of Parliament Dorothee Stapelfeldt told The Times of London? Or even, as she went on to say, that, “[fees] particularly discourage young people who do not have a traditional academic family background from taking up studies”?

Instead, higher education is peddled as the ticket to economic security by the federal government, commercial lenders, and universities—no matter the cost. Policies that would reduce the fear of unemployment, like the Job Guarantee programs supported by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and demanded by Martin Luther King Jr., might make it more feasible for young people to opt out of college. Yet policymakers in the United States seem unwilling to consider such options.

Thus, as sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom has argued, many young Americans, especially people of color, are desperate for higher education. Yet day by day, the student-debt status quo taxes borrowers while doing less and less to subsidize social mobility.

But the worst part is that it doesn’t have to be this way. To put it bluntly, there is no fiscal reason why the U.S. student debt crisis should exist.