Biden Administration Extends Attack on the Free Market in New Rules on Student Debt
Adam Kissel
August 11, 2022
Instead of addressing the college debt crisis, the Biden administration has proposed new rules designed to punish for-profit colleges and stick taxpayers with billions of dollars in debt forgiveness.
Taxpayers deserve accountability from the Department of Education, not carrots and sticks that interfere with a free marketplace for higher education.
The rules, proposed last month, do two things. They make it easier for students to get out of their contracted obligations, enabling more mistakes and opening the door to fraud. And they crack down on proprietary colleges, even while claiming the new rules apply to all institutions.
The cost to taxpayers will be in the tens of billions of dollars. But that’s small change compared with the rest of the nearly $2 trillion in student debt that the rules do not affect.
A core problem with federal student loans is the artificially low interest rates. The easy money, whether a student wants to pursue engineering or women’s studies, enables colleges to raise tuition ever higher. Instead of doing something about the problem, the department is making it worse by making the easy money even easier.
