Today, the Democratic staff of Congress’s Joint Economic Committee released a report which seems mainly to be an excuse to keep doing the wrong things.
The basic tenets of the report certainly feel sensible: People with more education tend to have greater skills and earn more, but the ever-inflating price of college saddles people pursuing education with bigger and bigger debts. The solutions? Keep subsidized federal loan rates frozen at 3.4 percent, greatly expand loan forgiveness, and convert private loans into federal loans. Basically, more cheap aid—exactly the wrong thing.
The fundamental problem with the report is the fundamental problem with federal aid in microcosm: It ignores the crippling, self-defeating, unintended consequences of aid. You know: The downsides of federal “help.”
First and foremost, federal aid furnishes jet fuel for tuition inflation, both by allowing people to demand more than they otherwise would, and by enabling schools to raise prices knowing students will be able to pay them. It also encourages millions of people to enroll in college who, for many reasons, have little prospect of finishing. That’s why roughly one out of every two people who enter a postsecondary program don’t finish. Finally, it powers over-credentialing, with about a third of people with bachelor’s degrees in jobs not requiring them, and many jobs that require the degree likely doing so for basic signaling reasons—e.g., the person has some basic stick-to-it-iveness—rather than indicating that they possess useful skills or abilities they obtained in college.
A reasonable reading of the data forces one to conclude that Washington should markedly reduce its presence in college—indeed, get out altogether—rather than perpetuate bad policy. Which is likely why policymakers seem to assiduously avoid reasonable readings—or any readings at all—of important data.
