A recent issue of Acton’s Religion & Liberty quarterly magazine, volume 29, number 2, explores issues in higher education, including student debt and rampant progressive bias in academia.
Since 1978 – the year the federal government offered subsidized loans to all students – the cost of college tuition has risen by 1,375 percent. Approximately 1,400 students default on those loans every day. “In short, more money cannot solve this problem and would only exacerbate it,” writes Rev. Robert Sirico. “What is desperately needed is entrepreneurial innovation, a new and more productive way of teaching and learning. As long as education is captured by politics, risk averse bureaucracy and unions, this can never happen.”
The cover story by Anne Rathbone Bradley unravels the crisis of student debt. “The essential problem of student loan debt and high tuition fees is not the loans themselves,” Bradley writes, “but the skyrocketing costs that are due to heavy government interference in higher education.”
Trey Dimsdale complements her essay with an article describing why proposals to “erase” student loan debt will only create additional moral hazards. “Education, like every other good, has a point of market equilibrium, and any scheme to subsidize it will distort the market,” he explains.
This issue of Religion & Liberty also features an excerpt from Samuel Gregg’s Reason, Faith and the Struggle for Western Civilization. Subscribe to Religion & Liberty here.
