An op-ed piece published last week in The Daily Beast by a New York University professor titled “Are Student Loans Immoral?” raises some of the most important questions regarding domestic policy that no one wants to talk about.
Thousands and thousands of college students across the country each year take out loans to fund their insanely high tuition prices (the highest in the world), only to have these loans sit on their back for years after they graduate from college. Especially in these tumultuous and uncertain economic times, many students are finding themselves simply unable to find a steady-paying job right after graduation and punctually pay off their thousands of dollars of loans. That scenario is just not realistic. And this very process should be questioned and debated in the public sphere.
In The Daily Beast article, Professor Andrew Ross says that it would take roughly $70 billion of the United States’ federal budget to fund tuitions at every private two- or four-year university in the country. This is how much was spent by the Pentagon last year for “unaccountable spending.” Last year, the government spent a total of $3.6 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. To break it down for you, that means it would take about three percent of the federal budget to make college free for virtually everyone. Looking at these stats, where exactly are the U.S. government’s priorities?
The concept of governments funding higher education is unfamiliar to only the United States. Other developed countries around the world have their priorities straight and are graduating students who have this burden on a lesser scale. This opens up life to them in a whole new way. These students have the freedom upon graduation to take on a world that many American students don’t feel they have fair access to. In Australia, for example, citizens who cannot afford to pay the tuition up front can opt to take out a full government loan that they do not have to pay back until after they graduate and are earning a salary of above the repayment threshold.
My friend Clara Tan, an engineering student at the University of Sydney, says, “No one really has ‘debt’ here to the extent that you do in America. First of all, the cost for university isn’t that high, and also there’s not a real crisis because Australians repay their education once they actually can. So most people do just fine.” Tan says that since tuition is for the most part taken care of, students worry most about paying for food and affording rent.
Tan, as a New Zealand citizen, receives Commonwealth benefits in which the government supports part of her tuition, leaving her with a contribution amount of about $8,544 that, luckily, her parents are able to afford. This Commonwealth-supported system is also available to Australian citizens and permanent resident and humanitarian visa holders. This stands in stark contrast to the eye-watering approximate $50,000 sticker tag on most private four-year universities in this country, even for U.S. citizens.
The subjects discussed and brought up by Professor Ross could not come at a more relevant time; with elections only a little more than a month away, young people should be heading to the polls and voting for the candidate that they feel will best support their livelihoods and ambitions. Being buried under mounds of debt is no way to take the first steps out into the real world after 20+ years of being promised so many things in the educational system.
Opening up opportunities for young people is the best way to ensure a strong and thriving economy. Making higher education affordable for citizens and backbreaking loans a thing of the past is the most effective way to go about this. The government should prioritize higher education in the federal budget, for the good of the entire nation in the long run.
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