OPINION:
President Biden is unrivaled when it comes to making money disappear. With the issuing of a press release, the Big Guy put taxpayers on the hook for spending as much money as the entire budget of the State Department.
It fell to the Department of Education to find a way to implement the administration’s scheme to eliminate $127 billion in debt owed by 3.6 million college students — a rather imposing task considering that over the summer, the Supreme Court blocked Mr. Biden’s previous attempt to accomplish the same goal. The only difference is that back then, the president’s more ambitious gambit sought to erase $430 billion in liabilities.
In the 6-3 ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts cleverly cited then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi to explain the court’s reasoning.
“People think that the president of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness,” the San Francisco Democrat said. “He does not. He can postpone. He can delay. But he does not have that power.”
Congress reiterated the point, with the Republican-led House and Democratic-controlled Senate in June voting to undo the White House’s first attempt to use the public treasure to woo college-age voters. While Mr. Biden vetoed the legislation, its passage leaves no doubt the president is acting without legal sanction.
Mr. Biden talks a lot about his opponents “undermining democracy,” but there’s no clearer example of an action that undermines our system of government than the use of executive fiat to implement extreme policies lacking the support of the people’s elected representatives.
Tuition at colleges and universities is outrageously high, so it is tempting to think the government might play a legitimate role in easing the burden for the sake of improving the competitiveness of future generations. But such reasoning fails to take into account the unintended consequences of federal meddling at the university level.
Subsidized loan programs are the cause of, not the solution to, soaring tuition rates. With Uncle Sam’s backing, university administrators have never had to make tough choices, such as asking whether it’s really in the students’ best interest to hire another vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion. Harvard never had any reason to question the value of classes such as “Latinx, 1492 to 2022.”
If Yale students had to work to pay off the $240,000 tab racked up after majoring in ethnicity, race and migration, they might have considered alternatives more in demand in the marketplace.
The most offensive aspect of the administration’s ploy is that Harvard, with its $50 billion endowment, and Yale, with its $40.7 billion endowment, don’t need subsidies at all. Yale earned $759 million on its financial investments last year alone — enough to pay the full $60,000 tuition for every one of its 12,000 undergraduate and graduate students.
These institutions have no incentive to give their students a free ride when Mr. Biden is doing it for them. The NACUBO-Commonfund Study of Endowments found the average endowment of the colleges it surveyed were in the billion-dollar range.
Instead of conjuring up new ways to spend tax money on education, Mr. Biden ought to encourage colleges to apply their own massive endowments to provide the relief students need.
