The Patriot Post® · Wednesday Opinion

Best of Right Opinion

• Ed Feulner & Virginia Foxx: Taming the Tuition Tiger
• Gary Bauer: ‘Secret Society’
• Star Parker: Trump Acknowledges National School Choice Week
• Jonah Goldberg: Trump’s Wall Should Be a Bargaining Chip on Immigration
• John Stossel: Keep It Closed!

For more of today’s columns, visit Right Opinion.

Opinion in Brief

Ed Feulner & Virginia Foxx: “Easy access to federal student aid has enabled colleges to raise tuition profligately over the past several decades. When combined with generous loan forgiveness policies, which must be paid for by taxpayers, the result has been a three-fold increase in the cost of college since the mid-1980s. Economist Richard Vedder found that, had tuition and fees at colleges and universities grown at a rate similar to the growth prior to 1978 — before there was significant federal subsidization of tuition — college costs at state universities would be closer to just $5,000 today. … The Congressional Budget Office estimates that American taxpayers are set to lose $108 billion over the next decade due to loan forgiveness policies. Loan forgiveness unfairly shifts the burden of paying for college from the student to the taxpayer, more than two-thirds of whom do not hold bachelor’s degrees themselves. At the same time, such practices enable universities to raise tuition, knowing that students will have their loans forgiven in due time. … Although there is more work to be done to really cut college costs, consolidating student loans, eliminating loan forgiveness, and eliminating in-school interest subsidies provides a long-overdue step toward resetting college pricing. Encouraging private lending to re-emerge would also help.”