Regardless, Johnson's point about student loans is a compelling one that deserves more attention.
Johnson's point, indeed. Ron Paul has been making that point for at least eleven years. I've spoken with him personally about this on two occasions. There are
very few sectors of the economy in which the costs have risen faster than medical services. Higher education is one of them. Universities have every incentive to keep raising tuition as long as they know that the students that they're trying to recruit can come by the money easily and cheaply simply by asking the federal government for it. Meanwhile, high school guidance councilors are advising any student who scores higher than a D in high school chemistry to attend a university and major in mathematics, science, or, if they are really into it, engineering, and you have the perfect recipe for a bloated system. Combine that with a state legislature which year after year decreases state funding to the public university system, or keeps it flat, and you have a perfectly unsustainable situation. Easy money from Uncle Sam keeps universities recruiting even from the bottom of the barrel, dwindling funds from the state keeps tuitions rising, cash-strapped, lower-class families faithful to the future economic opportunities keep borrowing low-interest money, grade inflation keeps just enough of them passing from year to year to keep administrators happy, and voila: a generation of college graduates neither prepared to meet the challenges of a global economy and a state university system so dependent on expansion and recruitment of any and all prospective students that six-year plans becomes the norm. After all, who wants to look for a job when you have talked to scores of people who have graduated and can't find any (either because they lack the skills or because the jobs they had imagined when their guidance councilors talked them into going to university don't exist), and who wants the students to graduate in four years when you can milk the federal government out of six years worth of tuition payments? Let's make it seven. Or eight. After all, if you can sell a box of widgets, then you should try to sell a hundred boxes, or a thousand. It's the American way.
