The College-Debt Debate Is a Culture-War Battle

O ne of Joe Biden’s first tests in office will be the urgent question of giving a big pile of money to rich people.

Biden wants a little welfare for the affluent in the form of a $10,000 college-loan giveaway accomplished through legislation, while the Democrats’ Left wants a lot more welfare for the wealthy in the form of a $50,000 student-loan giveaway accomplished through unilateral executive action.

And welfare for the wealthy is precisely what is in question here: The majority of student debt is held by relatively high-income people, poor people mostly are not college graduates, and those who attended college but did not graduate hold relatively little college-loan debt, etc. As the New York Times puts it, “Debt relief overall would disproportionately benefit middle- to upper-class college graduates.” Which ones? “Especially those who attended elite and expensive institutions, and people with lucrative professional credentials like law and medical degrees.”

The Democrats have become the party of moneyed urban and suburban professionals, and, on the matter of college loans, progressives are happy to see the rich get richer as Americans of more modest means subsidize relatively high-income Democratic households. Biden’s approach is distinguished from the progressives’ only by being a little less of the same.

Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas), who paid off his own more than $100,000 in Princeton and Harvard Law debt only a few years before running for president, is among the Republicans who are unhappy about the proposed giveaway. “I don’t believe any president has the authority to give away hundreds of billions of dollars through the stroke of a pen,” he’s said.

But the president does have that authority. Congress gave it to him. Congress can take it back.

Congress should.

The Higher Education Act of 1965 is one of many examples of Congress’s delegating excessive authority to the executive. The law gives the secretary of education the power to forgive student loans, a power that has been used for many years in a discretionary way, for example, in the case of students who acquire a “total and permanent disability.” But there is not much in the statute suggesting a limiting principle that would prevent a Biden administration from using this power in a broad and categorical manner. Biden is not keen to test that, and says he wants specific legislation — a handy excuse to sit on the issue if Republicans retain control of the Senate.

Most people with student loans have payments amounting to a relatively small share of their income (typically less than 10 percent and often much less), and there already are programs in place for certain kinds of hardship cases. College-debt forgiveness is not a program to relieve acute economic suffering, nor, as the Times notes, is it likely to prove an effective economic stimulus. It is nothing more or less than the Democrats’ political commitment to servicing a particularly upper-class form of entitlement mentality.

Take as your model the example of Michelle Obama complaining about having to repay her college debt. Mrs. Obama attended Princeton, and, like many Ivy League students, she attended at a discount. For the relatively small part of the expense of her education that she was expected to pay, she was provided with loans at a subsidized rate on very easy terms. (Perhaps she was the world’s most credit-worthy teenager.) A Princeton degree is not a guarantor of a happy and successful life, but it puts you right at the front of the line. Mrs. Obama went on to scale the commanding heights of American social and economic life, and when she complained — quite bitterly — about simply having to repay the generous loans made to her at a subsidized rate in order to provide her with the best undergraduate education money can buy, thereby easing her way into a life of genuine privilege, her complaints were met with general sympathy rather than with revulsion at her audacious ingratitude.

That’s how deeply rooted the collegiate entitlement is.

There is much to disentangle when it comes to higher education. We generally fail to distinguish adequately between liberal-arts education and job training, which is a separate and distinct undertaking. We try to counteract rising tuition by offering generous loans, which only sends tuition higher still, for the same reason low mortgage rates support rising house prices. We treat the bachelor’s degree as a general-purpose credential, which is preposterous, and at the same time we fail to adequately distinguish between the goals of undergraduate education and everything else that goes on at our universities. With all that money sloshing around the system, there is ample opportunity to create sinecures for reliable Democratic allies, the results of which can be seen in the exploding administrative payrolls of our institutions of higher learning, where growing non-educational expenditures have far outpaced spending on actual instruction.

The financial comingling of all of the diverse things that go on at our universities leaves us in the perverse position of simultaneously spending too much and too little on higher education. We spend too much money on jobs for friendly mediocrities — deputy assistant vice presidents for community engagement — and too little on high-impact enterprises such as basic science research, which in the context of our major research universities probably should be understood as something like a Big 12 football team: It resides at the university, but it isn’t really a part of the general undergraduate-education project.

But those are policy points, and college debt is a pure culture-war issue.

Well-off college graduates of progressive sensibility believe, and often say, that it is a crime that they ever were expected to pay for college in the first place — elite education is another one of those scarce goods, like health care, to which our Democratic friends have the bad habit of ignorantly declaring meaningless “rights” for themselves and their constituents. They see themselves as ornaments to society and believe that they are entitled to be rewarded for their virtue, which is college-certified.

In other words, this is Thomas Sowell’s “anointed,” on the march and hungry for patronage.

You’ll notice we are not having a national debate about paying off poor people’s mortgages. We could do that just as easily if the self-declared champions of the poor had any interest in anything other than their own status and their own appetites.

They don’t.

Joe Biden doesn’t know much, but he probably understands that much, at least — and, if he doesn’t, he’ll learn the hard way.