Student Loans

Last night on PBS Gwen asked her guest if her comments meant transferring the burden from students to the tax payers.

I could not believe her words. When did we decide that students were on their own to pay for their own higher education? When I went to college there was no higher order of good than educating our children. Education was a public infrastructure shared by the entire community. The cost is too great for families to bear alone, never mind expecting our children to pay for it themselves.

 Privatization was a cynical way of removing the cost of education from the state budget.

• Providing for student loans, so that students could pay for it all themselves, shifted the tax burden to disenfranchised minors.
• Doing so, also removed all tuition restraints against runaway tuition increases. 
• My point is that higher education is indeed a common necessity shared by us all, a common infrastructure which needs the support of a common tax base, for to call it anything else, it remains a tax, now born exclusively by the very few pupils still willing to pay. 
• Whether we like it or not, whether politically correct or not, we are in competition with the rest of the world for our survival as a society and as a nation. The world population growth makes it so. 
• Our primary education system has fallen behind the rest of the world.
• The high priced higher education system, however, attracts students of rapidly developing nations, not all with friendly intent.
• We find ourselves educating our competition at the expense of our own with the devastating effect of further shifting graduate level jobs to foreign countries as their students return home.
• Lastly and most tragically, as our graduates find that they must default on their loans, it creates a "sub-prime" student loan crisis nearly identical to the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

 The only solution would be for states to ante-up for low tuition and make the colleges semi responsible for finding jobs for students struggling to find employment sufficient to pay down their loans. Privatizing education as with public health is a bad idea.