Sen. Ron Johnson
Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, showing the same mastery of the student debt issue as he has of the
minimum wage, insisted Wednesday that
the reasons for high student debt are, first, that "We are pounding into our young people's brains that ... you'll be a second-class citizen if you don't get a four-year degree," and second, that "by subsidizing interest rates on loans we've enticed our children to collectively incur about $1 trillion of student loan debt." Instead, he said, vocational schools are the answer. "Let’s give our children and their parents the full range of options. Let’s quit preaching to them that their only path to success is a four-year degree."
Here's the thing. Absolutely a four-year degree should not be the only path to success. People with high school diplomas should not be second-class citizens. But what's driving young people to go to colleges they can't afford isn't some moral message. It's an economic reality, and it looks like this:
Johnson pointed out, correctly, that unemployment and underemployment remain too high among young college graduates.
But they're much higher among young people who didn't go to college. The correct answer to high student debt is not telling people to do something that may (or may not, if they go to a for-profit vocational school) leave them with lower debt but is also overwhelmingly likely to leave them with higher unemployment and lower wages. What we're looking at here is a huge problem with our crappy economy, not with college affordability.
Johnson also suggested that college costs are rising too fast. And he's right there, too. But what do you expect when per-student state and local higher education funding keeps hitting new 25-year lows? Students are paying more in large part because even as a college degree becomes more crucial to making a decent living (see graph above), the government is funding each student less.
The problem with student loan debt is so clear that even a Republican as mean and stupid as Ron Johnson can see it. But the real solutions continue to be all but absent from our political discourse.