Universities should foot the bill for student loan relief — not U.S. taxpayers — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said Thursday after President Joe Biden’s announcement that he plans to cancel up to $20,000 in student loan debt for qualifying individuals.
President Biden announced forgiving up to $20,000 in student loan debt for qualifying individuals making less than $125,000 per year.
According to the plan, the federal government will forgive up to $20,000 if an individual who makes less than $125,000 annually went to college on Pell Grants and up to $10,000 if an individual did not receive Pell Grants:
DeSantis is one of many critics who said Thursday that it is simply not fair for the Biden administration to put U.S. taxpayers in this position.
“It’s very unfair to have a truck driver have to pay back a loan for somebody that got like a PhD in gender studies. That’s not fair. That’s not right,” he said before highlighting that it is universities that are benefiting the most from all of this “exorbitant debt that’s been taken out over the last generation.”
Yet, Biden’s plan, he said, does nothing to hold universities accountable.
“They [universities] have bloated administrative budgets. They have all this although in Florida since I’ve been governor, no tuition increases at our state universities. We haven’t allowed that because all it does … is they plow it in” and “expand like the DEI office or something else like that,” he explained.
“And it has no real impact on the quality of the education when they’re raising the tuition. It just creates more administrative bloat, and that’s been going on, and the colleges and universities have gotten a free ride at this,” he said, contending that this version of student loan relief really is not relief after all because people are still paying for it.
“The people that should pay for it, it’s not the American taxpayers. … The university should be responsible for that,” DeSantis stated:
“If they’re producing people, they’re going deep into debt, and their degree is not worth anything, and they’re not able to make enough money to pay it back. Well, then that’s on them, and they’ve had an incentive to get more and more loans taken out and then put it in their pocket,” the governor continued, explaining that the emphasis should be on universities.
That aside, Biden’s move, DeSantis added, will simply fuel inflation further.
“You just had one of Obama’s economists come out and say this is the worst time to do this. It’s going to fuel inflation. This is not good policy. Obviously, the fairness and all that is very important. But it’s not a good fiscal or monetary policy,” he said, emphasizing that the Biden administration is doing this with “zero reform to the universities.”
According to an analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Biden’s debt cancellation plan will cost between “$440 billion and $600 billion over the next ten years.”
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