President Barack Obama has been busy recently traveling to college campuses across the country, talking about student loan debt and pitching his proposal to keep the interest rates on some federal loans at 3.4 percent for another year. His Republican rival, Mitt Romney, also supports a one-year extension.
While I agree with both that we need to make it easier for students to afford college, the president is not telling the whole story about how we got here and how we’re going to pay to fix it.
What the president needs to tell students is that his own health care policies are the principal reason that tuition and student debt are rising.
Medicaid mandates on states are soaking up dollars that would otherwise be spent on state universities and community colleges, forcing up tuition and resulting in more student loans and debt. Even worse, the federal government is trying to make a profit by overcharging students on their current loans and using part of the profit to pay for the new health care law.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, this takeover produced approximately $61 billion for the government — $8.7 billion of which went to pay for the new health care law.
The president’s new student loan proposal would, for one year, keep rates at 3.4 percent on new subsidized Stafford loans (those for which the federal government pays interest until students graduate), rather than increasing to 6.8 percent under current law. These loans account for about 40 percent of all federal student loans. According to the Congressional Research Service, the average student takes out approximately $3,600 in these new loans and will save about $7 a month in interest payments.
