The Daily Chart: College Bloat After the Loan Decision
7th July 2023
Steven Hayward at Power Line.
Harvey Mansfield once quipped that the Democratic Party is a coalition of college professors and morons, which prompted “Lucretia” to remark on a podcast that it is impossible to tell the difference. But if higher education wasn’t an adjunct of the Democratic Party, surely the left would be charging the industry with consumer fraud and price gouging. The likes to talk endlessly about the soaring cost of health care, but the cost of higher education has risen more than any other sector of our economy over the last 40 years, because government has turned higher education into a giant subsidy-capture machine. And few things have been more central to increasing subsidies colleges could capture than easy student loans. One may hope the Supreme Court decision on Friday to disallow forgiveness of student loans by executive fiat will pump the breaks on college costs, but don’t count on it.