The Price Tag Behind the Promise
Every election cycle, some politician promises to make college "free" or wipe away student loans with the stroke of a pen. It sounds compassionate. It polls well on college campuses. But compassion with other people's money is not a policy. It is a purchase order, and the invoice gets mailed to every taxpayer in the country.
The federal student loan portfolio already sits at roughly $1.7 trillion, a figure larger than the gross domestic product of all but a handful of nations. That debt did not appear because families were reckless. It appeared because Washington kept shoveling cheap credit into university coffers while schools hiked tuition faster than inflation. Between 1980 and 2020, average tuition and fees at private nonprofit colleges more than tripled after adjusting for inflation. Public four-year institutions nearly tripled their published tuition over the same span. The federal government did not solve that problem. It subsidized it.
Now the same voices who engineered the bubble want to burst it onto the Treasury. Estimates for tuition-free public college range from $47 billion to $75 billion per year, depending on which senator is holding the microphone. Debt cancellation proposals add hundreds of billions more. Those are not abstract figures. They are classrooms for children, roads for commuters, and prescription relief for seniors that will be crowded out by a transfer payment to the best-educated slice of the American workforce.
Forgiveness Rewards the Wrong People
The most galling part of the debt-forgiveness crusade is who benefits. Student loan borrowers are not, by and large, the downtrodden. The Brookings Institution has found that the top 40 percent of earners hold roughly 60 percent of all student loan debt. The bottom 20 percent hold less than 10 percent. Forgiveness is not a ladder for the poor. It is a windfall for lawyers, doctors, dentists, and policy analysts who borrowed heavily for advanced degrees and now want their neighbors to foot the bill.
That is not populism. It is regressive redistribution dressed in working-class rhetoric. A plumber in Ohio with no degree would be forced to pay off the loans of a sociology graduate in Brooklyn. A truck driver in Texas would be on the hook for the MBA debt of a consultant in Arlington. The left calls this fairness. Most Americans would call it a raw deal.
There is also the small matter of precedent. Canceling debt today tells tomorrow's freshmen that loans are optional. Why shop for a reasonably priced state school when the government may simply erase the tab? The result is more borrowing, higher tuition, and another political fight in a decade over the next round of "forgiveness." It is a cycle that rewards universities for raising prices and punishes families who saved, sacrificed, and paid their own way.
Education Without Accountability
The deeper flaw in the free-college movement is that it treats a credential as a right rather than a responsibility. Not every degree pays off. The Federal Reserve reports that roughly 40 percent of recent college graduates are working jobs that do not require a bachelor's degree. Many of them carry debt they cannot discharge in bankruptcy because Washington made that impossible decades ago. Instead of fixing the bankruptcy code or demanding that schools publish honest employment outcomes, the progressive answer is to nationalize the loss.
Meanwhile, administrative bloat has consumed campuses. Between 1976 and 2018, administrative positions at American colleges and universities grew by 164 percent, while tenure-track faculty positions grew by less than half that rate. Students are not paying for better teaching. They are paying for diversity coordinators, sustainability officers, and layers of bureaucracy that add no value to a chemistry lecture or an accounting course. Free tuition would insulate that bloat from market pressure indefinitely.
Conservatives should not be satisfied with simply opposing bad ideas. We should offer better ones. Expand apprenticeship programs. Allow income-share agreements. Make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy so lenders have skin in the game. Tie federal aid to measurable outcomes such as graduation rates and graduate earnings. And above all, stop pretending that a four-year degree is the only path to dignity. Welders, electricians, and machinists build this country, and many of them earn more than the graduates who look down on them.
The real cost of free college is not measured in campaign applause lines. It is measured in trillions of dollars, in distorted labor markets, and in a generation taught that someone else will always pick up the check. That is a lesson this country cannot afford.
