Here’s a story you might not have heard.
In 1946, President Harry Truman created a commission to make recommendations for how
to reform higher education.
After doing extensive research, the Commission released a six volume report arguing that
higher education was becoming increasingly important and should be accessible to EVERYONE
regardless of age, background, or ability to pay.
As a first step, the Truman Commission proposed making freshman and sophomore year of college
TOTALLY FREE at public universities.
The Commission also recommended offering grants to fully cover living expenses for every university
student who needed them.
And it recommended providing all of this on an INCLUSIVE BASIS: dismantling racial and
religious exclusion, increasing women’s enrollment, and creating more flexible admission
standards to account for economic disadvantages.
And that was all just supposed to be a first step.
How did they propose to pay for this?
The Commission found that “phenomenal increases in productivity per worker” would generate
enough social surplus to “support education at all levels far more adequately in the future
than we could in the past,” that is, so long as we made education a collective priority.
And then Congress implemented the Commission’s recommendations, and college has been
affordable to everybody who wanted to attend ever since.
Okay, that last part isn’t true.
Actually, it’s JUST THE OPPOSITE today.
America is DROWNING in student debt – 1.7 TRILLION dollars of it, and growing.
And it’s hard to IMAGINE a Presidential Commission making the types of recommendations
that the Truman Commission did, even though we live in a much wealthier, more integrated,
and more technologically advanced society.
What happened?
Well, the Truman Commission was right that productivity would continue to increase, but
we did NOT make education a collective priority.
Or, more accurately, POLITICAL ELITES who were worried that too much EDUCATION might
lead to too much EQUALITY didn’t make it a priority.
So the GROWING WEALTH created by increased productivity went toward making the rich richer,
and not into educating more people.
To see how this happened, we have to go back to the end of the Second World War.
That was the FIRST TIME many middle class people started to go to college.
Because of a federal law called the GI Bill, veterans – a huge percentage of the population
back then – could even attend college FOR FREE.
Because of state-level commitments to education, public college was CHEAP and ACCESSIBLE for
massive numbers of people beyond veterans, too.
There were still deep inequalities, but college was no longer just a training ground for the
rich.
With universities opening to more people, feminists and the civil rights movement began
to break down barriers.
The increasing presence of working class people, women, and people of color on college campuses
made them centers for political and social dissent.
Protest, debate, and activism became part of college life.
Soon there was a backlash.
Some politicians thought this was TOO MUCH free speech, from the WRONG type of people.
They wanted a return to the old system.
A candidate for California governor named RONALD REAGAN started attacking people he
called “CAMPUS RADICALS.”
In the year 1970, an adviser to Reagan declared in a speech: “We are in danger of producing
an educated proletariat.
That’s dynamite!
We have to be selective on who we allow to go through higher education.”
When these politicians gained power, they made sharp cuts to education funding.
California, under Reagan’s influence, went from funding 32 percent of the University
of California budget in 1974 to just 16 percent in 2004.
Elsewhere, cuts to education were justified on the logic of “living within our means.”
President Gerald Ford criticized New York City’s CUNY system for offering a program
where “any high school graduate, rich or poor,” could attend without paying tuition.
Imagine that.
In the midst of a city budget crisis in 1976, Wall Street bond investors forced CUNY to
charge tuition for the first time.
While politicians were slashing funding, business strategies to undermine working class power
restructured industry in a way that redirected income toward jobs in management and finance
and away from everyone else.
The jobs that paid well required college degrees.
That meant that, even as education funding collapsed, the number of people entering college
continued to increase.
So: incomes for most people were starting to stagnate and higher education was becoming
more important in getting a job that paid well, so more and more people were going to
college.
Meanwhile, because of an ideology of false scarcity, state funding was not keeping up.
What filled the gap?
Student loans.
Student loans are actually a creation of the federal government.
They were created on the assumption that states would mostly cover the cost of college, so
federal loans would be for a relatively small number of people, paid off painlessly within
a few years of graduating.
But as tuition climbed and state grants receded, a whole INDUSTRY developed around student
lending.
By the 1990s, massive student loans were the norm, and colleges began to base their business
models around them.
Fast forward to today, and the results have been catastrophic.
45 MILLION Americans have student loans, and each graduating class owes more than the last.
In 1980, there were only a few million dollars of student loans.
By 2000, that number was around 50 billion.
In 2010, 200 billion.
And today, we have nearly TWO TRILLION dollars outstanding.
Instead of starting a family or buying a car, let alone starting a business or starting
a movement, young people today live with a SWORD OF DEBT hanging over their head.
Student debt is even causing many older people to put off retirement.
Things are so bad that one in fifteen student borrowers has considered suicide because of it.
Too many lives are being ruined.
And here is the craziest part.
All of that student debt DOESN’T HAVE TO EXIST.
I’m not saying that in a hypothetical way.
I’m saying that if the President of the United States wanted, he could wipe out almost
all student debt RIGHT NOW.
You see, 95 percent of student debt is owed to the federal Department of Education.
And when Congress created the student loan program, it gave the Secretary of Education
authority to “compromise, waive, or release” or “modify” ANY federal student debt for
ANY reason.
This is often called “settlement authority.”
Now, the settlement authority has never been used to bring about broad cancellation.
I’ve done a deep review of the relevant case law, and the legal argument for it is
VERY strong.
In fact, after I wrote a law review article that made that case, a growing number of senators
have been convinced and began to advocate for the Secretary of Education to cancel student
debt.
Few things are certain in law, but clearly the case is good enough that it’s at least
worth a test.
Think about it.
Cancelling federal student loans would instantly make tens of millions of people’s lives
better.
Its benefits would flow to their families and their communities, and help stimulate
the broader economy.
But cancelling student debt is only the first step toward building a higher education system
that works for all.
If we care about living in a democratic society, we should use our enormous wealth to invest
in making it possible for ANYONE to access all the education they want.
Certainly we should not condemn people to a lifetime of debt for wanting to learn or
better themselves.
All of this was clear to a Presidential Commission in 1946.
It’s well past time to recover that vision and to build on it.
I’m Luke Herrine, PhD student at Yale Law School, for the Gravel Institute.