It's the colleges and lenders, not the borrowers, who deserve the ire over student loans

Forty years ago I walked into an office as a 21-year-old college student, where a woman, only slightly older than I was, asked a few questions and then handed me a check for $4,000. I fought back the urge to ask her if she were crazy.

I didn’t really need it. I had no job prospects, so my ability to pay it back was sketchy. I was really only there because a friend had told me how easy it was to get a student loan, and I couldn’t believe it. Plus it would be nice to have $4,000, although I don’t think a penny of it went toward my education.

But don’t hold my experience against the 45 million people who have run up $1.6 trillion in student loan debt. When I was in school, tuition was maybe $500 a semester, and most if not all of that was covered by a Pell grant. Today, tuition and fees at a public university are more than $21,000. Loans are no longer optional.

More:Do I qualify for student loan forgiveness? What to know about Biden's debt plan.

I paid back my loan, which was small enough that I was able to make extra payments and be done with it in a couple of years. So — should I be angry that I, as a taxpayer, will be paying back the loans of others?

I’m not, but if I were, I wouldn’t be mad at the students. I’d be mad at the adult academics who stopped seeing higher education as a mission to train and inspire young minds, and began to see it as a money-printing machine.

You do not need to be a crabby old cynic or a bug-eyed conspiracy theorist to see a direct, scratch-my-back line between the schools and lenders — both of which are rewarded for making higher education unaffordable.

And these are the legitimate colleges. What of all the poor students who were sucked in by defacto usury mills masquerading as private schools, whose “degrees” aren’t worth the paper they were printed on?

Republicans want to investigate Dr. Fauci. Better they should bring in the university and bank presidents and make them sweat as they explain their convenient and profitable relationship.

We have a tradition in this country of making whole people who have been wronged. If someone is injured in a car accident that is another's fault, we agree that person should be compensated — even if it means higher insurance rates for the rest of us.

We collectively pay for bad medical results, corporate pollution, wet floors, defective products and frivolous claims of election fraud. The taxpayers of Los Angeles County will be indirectly picking up the tab for $31 million awarded to Vanessa Bryant and another man whose family members’ broken bodies were photographed by first responders following a helicopter crash and shared with barroom buddies.

Further, The New York Times recently reported that a home owned by a black Maryland couple appraised for $472,000; when the home was made to look as if it were owned by a white family, it appraised for $750,000.

When people speak of reparations to African Americans, it’s not so much for the actions of our white ancestors in the first half of the 1800s. It’s for the unfair withholding — through discriminatory housing, education, employment, investing opportunities — of massive amounts of wealth to which blacks would have been entitled had their skin color only been white.

So no, I don’t mind young people getting help with their debt. What I do mind is that it does nothing to disincentivize the sewer rats in the higher-education/finance cartels, who will keep operating with impunity — raising tuition, forcing kids into debt and failing to deliver employment and income that gives kids a prayer of paying it back in a reasonable amount of time.

These parasites will continue to bleed students dry, not just during their college years but for decades afterward. How many graduates of the University of Alabama struggle under tens of thousands of dollars of debt load so the school can throw $11.7 million annually at its football coach?

Today, universities and their financier pals are the 21st century equal of the company store in 1920s coal towns. Give graduating students the means to earn an income, but then be sure they spend that income not on homes or cars or anything productive, but on interest payments.

It will all come crashing down of course, once it becomes obvious that you can get a better education on YouTube than you can get at Harvard. Too bad that so many bad actors will get to ride the gravy train until reality sets in.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Cozy relationship between higher ed, lenders should be investigated