Our higher-education system is bloated. Biden’s student-loan plan won’t help.
President Biden’s latest plan to cancel or reduce student loans for 25 million Americans is indicative of a higher education system that is bloated and dysfunctional.
Our colleges and universities are too involved in real-estate acquisition and development, professional-sports-athlete farming, indoctrination of political ideologies, money laundering, and accumulation wealth for their individual institutions.
Thus, failing to recruit, admit and properly educate highly ethical and professional doctors, lawyers, teachers and other members of our professional class — folks who are capable of obtaining and sustaining employment in order to pay back their student loans.
All of this occurs under the umbrella of not-for-profit status and not-for-profit laws. Most of these colleges and universities are sitting on endowments in excess of hundreds of millions of dollars, while our federal government sits on a debt in excess of 34 trillion dollars and will ask the taxpayers to absorb all of this student-loan debt. These same student loans helped make these college and university endowments as fat as they are.
A commission needs to be formed to realign our higher-education system through the changing of our not-for-profit laws, the tax code and administrative rules governing the use of federally backed student loans.
Edward J. Smitreski
Northampton