Rep. Paul Ryan (Jason Reed/Reuters)
Rep. Paul Ryan, the Republican Party's very serious intellectual leader on budget issues, has penned a
Wisconsin State Journal op-ed on the future his state's 2012 college graduates face.
Ryan's piece oozes with concern over student loan debt and rising tuition, problems for which he claims his budget holds the answers. In translation, though, all of Ryan's answers for students boil down to more punitive policies—policies like those his party has already put into place that are exacerbating the student debt crisis.
The doubling of student loan interest rates on July 1—an upcoming blow to millions of people struggling with student loan debt if Republicans don't stop blocking action to keep interest rates at their current level—is not something Ryan sees fit to mention. Hundreds of thousands of the poorest college students will also lose their Pell Grants on July 1, thanks to cuts pushed by Republican members of Congress in last summer's debt ceiling deal. But not only do these things not merit a mention in Ryan's op-ed, they're actually consistent with the approach he's claiming would help students:
The goal of federal financial aid is to make college more affordable, but there is growing evidence that wholesale increases in aid have had the opposite effect. Instead of helping more students achieve their dreams, these increases are simply being absorbed by (and potentially enabling) large tuition increases.
Consequently, student loan debt is on pace to eclipse $1 trillion. [...]
Here, Ryan is suggesting that correlation is causation (it's not), that because federal student aid and tuition went up at the same time, the increase in the former is responsible for the increase in the latter. No explanation of why he doesn't think it's the opposite, with tuition increases making increased student aid more likely. No mention of the fact that in 2007-2008, the
average Pell Grant covered just 21 percent of the average public college tuition, while in the 1970s the average Pell Grant covered nearly 75 percent of the average public college tuition. No mention of the fact that in 2010,
per-student public higher education funding was at a 25-year low, which is to say government aid helping students pay tuition was more necessary because the government was not funding the schools those students attend at the level it had over the previous 25 years. No, according to Paul Ryan the existence of aid may just be the reason for rising tuition. His answers?
The House-passed budget addresses this problem by limiting the growth of open-ended financial-aid subsidies. Instead, we focus aid on low-income students who need help most. Furthermore, we propose to remove regulatory barriers that restrict competition, flexibility and innovation in higher education.
Translation: Under Ryan's budget,
one million students would lose Pell Grants, while millions more taking student loans would have to begin paying interest while still in school, and he's pretending that this would stop tuition rates from increasing (it wouldn't) and thereby benefit students. Furthermore, he proposes to
remove regulatory barriers give free rein to
for-profit colleges, which charge higher tuitions than public colleges, have high drop-out rates, produce nearly half of all federal student loan defaults despite only enrolling around 10 percent of students, and aggressively and deceptively recruit students,
veterans in particular.
Students who need financial aid to get through college are very nearly the last group of people Paul Ryan is concerned about. His actions speak much louder than his words on that one—and even his words do a pretty poor job of pretending concern for students rather than a desire to push his punitive budget.