Editorial

 

It’s easy to find reason behind the Biden administration’s decision to cancel up to $20,000 in federal student loan debt for tens of millions of borrowers.

Indeed, the amount of overall student debt has skyrocketed in recent years, and many individuals and families are paying off amounts of $40,000 or more — and struggling, often mightily — to do so.

Student loan debt has been cited as a reason why many young professionals are unable to buy homes and achieve the lifestyle they had envisioned when they went to college and pursued a career.

But the administration’s plan to simply cancel large swaths of this debt is not the answer to this growing problem. It is costly (we don’t even know how much this is going to cost the taxpayers), arbitrary, and, yes, inherently unfair to those who have already paid off college loans, worked two or three jobs so they wouldn’t have to take on debt, or opted not to go to college because they couldn’t afford it.

But beyond that, this plan to simply take debt off the books is a simplistic approach to a problem that you can equate, in some respects, to a backyard weed. You can cut it down, like the Biden administration is doing by erasing some of this debt, but to really address the problem, you need to get at the roots.

And this will require a solution that is far more complicated than simply forgiving $10,000 or $20,000 in college-loan debt.

The cost of a college education has skyrocketed over the past few decades, far accelerating the pace of inflation. It is these spiraling costs that need to be brought under control.

Increasingly, a college education is necessary to thrive in today’s technology-driven economy. But the cost of that education — at most all institutions, but especially private, four-year colleges and universities — is now more than most individuals and families can handle — unless they assume large amounts of debt to close the gap between the cost and what they can afford.

The challenge for the Biden administration is to tackle this problem at the roots, to somehow control and perhaps even bring down the cost of a college education so that individuals and families don’t have to take on debt. That’s a big challenge and there are no easy answers.

But that answer will be a better, more meaningful solution than waving one’s hand and simply eliminating hundreds of billions of dollars in loan payments at taxpayers’ expense.

That’s because the weed is going to grow back. v