From The Fields

College just got a lot less fun.

Both the Trump administration and the Biden administration in response to the COVID panic, decided it would be a good thing (that is they might be able to get more votes from people with college debts) if they put a moratorium on or canceled student college debt. It didn' work for Trump. But, arguably, it helped Biden avert disaster in the 2022 midterms when he proposed to cancel the debt permanently. As he undoubtedly knew at the time and as the Supreme Court just ruled in Biden v. Nebraska, he had no authority to cancel over $400 billion in student debt through executive order. But the ruling came after the vote was in so too bad suckers, I mean students. Your degree isn't free after all.

The primary reason college costs have been inflating at roughly twice the rate of the overall inflation rate is due to college loans readily available to anyone who can fog a mirror. It's elementary supply and demand. The number of college seats is relatively fixed. The number of students to fill those seats has gone up rapidly because of the easy availability of federal college loans.

The marketing myth for colleges is that a college degree is necessary and sufficient for a comfortable middle or even upper class career. Imagine the disappointment of a graduate in civilization studies learning that the best job to be had is in the civilized art of brewing coffee. And trying to pay off many thousands of dollars of student debt on a minimum wage job. College may or may not be necessary for a good job but it sure is not sufficient.

Oh, and student debt, by law, cannot be discharged like most every other kind of debt, in bankruptcy.

Libertarians know that when the government tries to go into business, it usually messes things up big time. Lending to students is a prime example of that. Thousands of young people have been lured into lifetimes of non dischargeable debt.

It will cause social and cultural discord for decades.

The United States Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action in college admissions. In a case involving Harvard and the University of North Carolina, two of the oldest colleges in the country, the court said colleges could no longer use the race of the applicant as a determining factor in whether they were granted admission.

In practice, that meant that blacks and Hispanics were more likely to be admitted than those of Asian or white heritage, everything else being equal.

A little history: Brown v. Board of Education ended the Plessy v. Ferguson legal doctrine of separate but equal. For the reason obvious to anyone who actually looked, that separate was not equal. All black schools on the wrong side of the tracks did not provide an education equal to all white schools in the suburbs. Brown said that a public education "must be made available to all on equal terms." Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's opinion in 2003 in Grutter v. Bollinger watered that down to allow the affirmative action we have lived with for the last 20 years.

O'Connor herself said that in 25 years affirmative action would no longer be needed. The Roberts court shortened that to 20 years, saying "Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it."

If it were not for the fact that the vast majority of colleges in the United States accept federal aid, either directly or in the form of aid to students, affirmative action would not be of much interest to us. Libertarians believe that the First Amendment provision for freedom of assembly implies the freedom to assemble with whomever you wish to. If a person wished to assemble with a student body more heavily weighted to people of color, we're fine with that.

Where libertarians (and most other people) have a problem is when we must, as taxpayers, fund the education of students with lower academic qualifications at the expense of students with higher academic qualifications. That's what affirmative action does.

The 22 or so colleges in the United States which do not accept government funding in any way are free to practice affirmative action however they want to. And we have no problem with that.

From Libertarian Counterpoint 1663

What trouble do we cause when messing with monetary policy?

Why did Richard Fly his American Flag on Flag Day?