College: It’s Not For Poor People Anymore

Roy has a must-read post about a Republican plan to subject student loans to variable interest rates. To me, this is the most appalling passage from the WSJ op-ed Roy discusses:

Private lenders would have that much more incentive to do their jobs properly, making sure taxpayer-backed loans go to students who are good risks.

Think about that for a second. To state the obvious, 1)most students going to college have not established credit, and 2)whether a student is a “good risk” is therefore highly dependent on their family’s assets. Despite this, the chair of the House Education Committee wants to use government guarantees to assure that banks will make capital accessible to those who least need it, while poor students will either be subject to potentially crushing (and unpredictable) interests payments after college or denied credit altogether. So, to summarize, while rational people believe that the point of government-backed student loans is to allow people who otherwise shouldn’t afford it to go to college, a significant faction of the Republican Party believes that the point of government intervention is to further exacerbate inequities in access to education. But none of this changes the fact that Sean Penn once made Shanghai Surprise, so really it’s The Left than hates the American Dream.