August Harriman at American Thinker on “The Great College Education Con.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/the_great_college_education_con.html

As if the pandemic didn’t result in enough wealth being transferred from working people to the upper classes, there’s another move afoot to transfer even more by canceling student loan debt. Of course, the bill will fall to the taxpayers, which means blue collar workers who went to work right after high school will fork over some of their hard-earned wages to pay debts run up by people who spent up to six years in college getting degrees that don’t pay their bills.

Please don’t think I’m unsympathetic to people struggling with student loan debt. While they willingly took on such debt, they were young and naive, and they’d been told that they would never get ahead without that degree. They didn’t realize it came with an anchor of debt. And our society has so over-emphasized college that even some factory and front counter jobs now require degrees, even if you could learn everything you needed to know from a few weeks of on-the-job training. These students didn’t know that what America really needs is truckers, machinists and plumbers, not more unemployed gender studies majors.

But I still don’t think it’s the responsibility of the taxpayers to pay off other people’s debts, particularly when it does nothing but further feed a system that’s resulted in skyrocketing tuition costs and overpaid administrators who are doing a worse job than ever of educating students. (While students in other nations are learning the latest advances in science, our schools are telling them that math is racist.)

Sadly, the idea of “student loan relief” is very popular in some quarters. To take a hypothetical example, try to imagine someone so privileged that even though she’s in Congress and pulling down 174 grand a year plus benefits, she thinks the taxpayers should pay off her remaining $17,000 student loan for her obviously worthless economics degree. Both she and America would have been better off if she’d gone to trade school and become a welder.

Anyway, read the linked article. It tells us how we got here and the shocking costs of this giant back-scratching arrangement between government and academia, both in monetary terms and in the devastating effect it’s having on young people who are forced to delay or forgo marriage, children, homeownership and even saving for retirement. We don’t need a giant transfer of wealth to keep the corrupt, bloated system afloat; we need to change the system. If college students really want to be “woke,” then they should wake up to how they’re being scammed.