Tornado Alley (PROG)

[lesgetrich]

When I went to college I had a low interest federal government subsidized loan and state scholarship that paid most of the expense. Post WW II, the government heavily subsidized higher education through the GI bill, the National Defense Student Loan Program and other federal and state subsidies. Then, Republicans let these programs die in the 1970's and preached the virtues of letting private financial institutions fund student loans for those who couldn't afford a college education. After all, private financial institutions would do a better job than the government, right? As college cost grew and tuitions became less and less affordable, the GOP has made it virtually impossible to eliminate student debt in bankruptcy and now the extremist right wing Supreme Court has tanked Biden's student debt relief plan...

How The Cost Of College Went From Affordable To Sky-High

It was a different story 70 years ago, when most Americans thought college was only for the wealthy elite. That changed after World War II with the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the GI Bill of Rights.

The law made college affordable for a group of veterans who never would have thought of going beyond high school, says John Thelin, a professor at the University of Kentucky and author of A History of American Higher Education.

The GI Bill was an unexpected success, Thelin says, enrolling just under 8 million veterans — 10 times the number the authors of the bill had predicted.

This sudden, enormous demand, Thelin adds, could have pushed college costs higher — but didn't, because states embraced the idea. The booming postwar economy allowed them to spend unprecedented sums of money to expand higher education.

"The biggest problem that was facing governors and legislators was, could we build campuses fast enough?" Thelin says.

While states were investing, the federal government was carving out a new role for itself: helping families pay for college. It spawned the National Defense Student Loan program, later called the Federal Perkins Loan program, which did for civilians what the GI Bill had done for veterans — and opened college gates even wider.

Then, with the civil rights movement as the backdrop, the landmark Higher Education Act of 1965 pushed for greater college access for women and minorities.

At the same time, Thelin says, from "1965 to 1972, colleges and universities dug very deep into their own pockets to provide grants and other forms of student financial aid in partnership with the new federal programs."

Americans flocked to campuses with the expectation that the government was going to foot part of the bill, and college did become affordable for many more Americans.

But a turning point arrived around 1970, Thelin says. With double-digit inflation, an oil embargo and a sputtering economy, a perfect storm began to build. College tuition and fees climbed as much or more than the inflation rate. Private loans, heavily subsidized by the federal government, gradually replaced federal grants as the main source of money for both poor and middle-class college students.

As family income fell, borrowing to pay for college took off, while public investment in higher education dropped. Sandy Baum of the Urban Institute says that drop has been the single biggest reason for the increase in college costs.

"So it's not that colleges are spending more money to educate students," Baum says. "It's that they have to get that money from someplace to replace their lost state funding — and that's from tuition and fees from students and families."