The only people gargantuan student loans serve are those growing fat on the higher education sector and associated services. For the rest of us from students to taxpayers, this business model is perfectly toxic. The fact that schools should have a duty to place the best interests of their students first, is no where to be found in yet another grotesque greed chapter. This is what happens when the private sector and free market forces become disfigured by gushing government money. Everyone is left weaker in the end. The days of all-you-can-eat credit must end now. See: Schools lobbying for unlimited student loans
For the past nine years, graduate students in the U.S. have had almost a blank check to take out as much as $80,000 a year in government-backed loans to pay for tuition and living expenses. Republican Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee thinks that’s too much. He’s introduced legislation, backed by his Democratic colleagues Michael Bennet of Colorado and Cory Booker of New Jersey, to limit borrowing to $30,000 a year, with a cap of $150,000. Programs with especially high costs could appeal to the U.S. Department of Education to let their students borrow up to $15,000 more each year.
Colleges, whose lobbyists and trade associations have succeeded in defeating just about every attempt to control rising tuition costs over the last decade, are trying to soften Alexander’s proposed law…
The presence of university lobbying in Washington dates back at least to World War II, when the federal government began awarding large research grants. “The people running the government were graduates of the top schools, so they” wanted their own schools to get the grants, says Gerald Cassidy, a Washington lobbyist who represented dozens of colleges and universities over the years before he retired in December. In the 1970s and ’80s, many institutions brought their lobbying in-house, opening Washington offices.
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